Okay, I figured out how to take my existing OS installation from a
single SATA drive and put it on a set of mirrored partitions on two
different SATA drives. I looked at ALL of the "recipies" I could find on
the Web -- none of them were quite right for MY situtation.
I will post my recipe here tomorrow for others to see -- maybe it will
help somebody else. I just want to edit a few things to clarify before I
post it. Some of the gotchas were were amusing -- like I couldn't run
LILO on degraded raid1 arrays, and running "mkinitrd" from within
Mandriva 2006 produces gzipped initrd files, but running "mkinitrd" by
chrooting in from a LIVE CD produces initrd files that needs cpio to
decompress and read it.
So, now that I have a running mirrored OS, I have a few more questions.
-- If I were to create disk images of EACH drive (i.e., /dev/sda and
/dev/sdb), could I restore each of those images to NEW drives -- with
all of their respective partitions -- and have a working RAIDED OS? I
ask because my ultimate goal is to put a RAIDED OS on many systems, and
once I get ONE working, it would be nice to clone them the way I already
clone SINGLE OS drives. Can you clone RAIDS? It would mean, of course,
that the UUIDs would be the same on each system. Is that bad? Is there
any risk here?
-- I know there was a lot of discussion on the list a while back about
whether or not to mirror SWAP space. Was there ever any conclusion? It
seems to me that mirroring will ensure that if one drive fails, you
don't lose information in virtual memory. My applications rarely if
every use virtual memory anyway so I'm not worried about speed. I want
the ultimate in stabilty for the OS drive. Otherwise, I guess I would
designate swap space on just one drive (but prepare identical partitions
on each for swap). If the first drive failed (/dev/sda -- with the swap
space), /dev/sdb would become the new /dev/sda anyway. And so fstab
would be correct in pointing to /dev/sda.
Sound opinions welcome.
Thanks,
Andy Liebman
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