On Wednesday 28 January 2009, John Doe wrote: > > > Yes, that's the plan but, the thing is to be able to run the > > > utilities... I need either to make a live CD with the HP tools > > > installed, or a "temporary OS with the tools... First try will be to > > > create a RAID6 on 3 disks (=1 TB, so no grub problems), install the OS, > > > run HP ACU, extend the RAID to the 12 disks, and create the logical > > > disks... If first try fails, second try would be to use a temporary USB > > > disk to install a temporary OS. > > > > This sounds much better to me. Invest 30 min. and install a centos-5 to a > > 4G usb-stick. Put hpacucli and hpaducli on it and then you can configure, > > manage and diagnose any server you want. > > I meant RAID6 on 4 disks of course... ^_^ > I could install and boot, but the CLI version of the ACU is a bit > intimidating... And long and complex command lines, without command history > is really painful. True, that's why you run hpacucli from the linux shell :-) This way bash (or whatever you use) will save the history. > Anyway, I managed and am currently extending the array > to the 12 disks... It seems that it is going to take around 3 days! Maybe > because the cache battery is not fully charged and so the writes are not > cached... After that, I need to reduce the "boot" logical disk down to a > dozen of GBs. And then, I need to create the other(s) logical disk(s). I think a sane end config is one logical drive for the OS (further chopped up with a ms-dos partition table) and one large logical drive for data (possibly chopped up with a gpt partition table or lvm). > > > As for the logical disks sizes, we would go with > > > something like 5 disks of 1.9TB. So, just classic msdos partitions. > > > One thing is for sure, HP tries really hard to make it complicated... > > > > Why would you make 5 logical drives? Why use partition tables? > > Hum... just wanted to be fdisk friendly (no gpt)... The is no reason to be ms-dos-partition friendly on the "data device", IMO. > But, since grub problem should be solved, I guess I could make 1 big > logical disk with gpt and forget about fdisk... Don't mix things up here, fdisk is a tool that can only handle ms-dos partition tables. parted is a tool that can handle many types, including gpt. It's the partition table type that is the problem not the tool so to speak. > > I saw that the use of LVM was tossed around, don't know if the OP > > is/plans on using it. If you use ext3 on lvm, you can do a background > > fsck while the system is up & fs mounted: > > I must admit that I have never used lvm... > We don't really need resizable/expandable volumes, etc... the server's > capacity is already maxed. We try to follow the "KISS" principle as much as > we can. You can look at LVM as just another way to partition a drive. In that sense it's more flexible and harder to mess up than using, say, parted+gpt. With parted+gpt you'd partition the /dev/cciss/cXdY device into many cXdYpN devices. With lvm you'd get to name them and they would be available as /dev/VOLUMEGROUPNAME/LOGICALVOLUMENAME. Go with the way you know and understand. > But the live background fsck seems nice. This feature seems to violate the KISS principle for sure... /Peter > Do you really think I should learn lvm rightaway? > > JD
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