On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Leslie Rhorer <lrhorer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > It's certainly workable. You might consider something other than >> > RAID1 for your swap partition. >> >> Looks reasonable. Some comments: >> >> 1) I didn't bother using RAID on my /boot. I just installed grub on >> each of the 3 drives but only boot from the first one. If that >> partition goes bad I can boot from the second or third drive any time >> by just telling BIOS to use a different drive. This saves me from >> dealing with any mkinitrd stuff. I've never had a boot partition go >> bad because of the drive itself in 14 years running Linux. They go bad >> because I write the wrong stuff there. RAID doesn't solve that >> problem. This method does require that I update the two backups by >> hand once in awhile. That's OK by me. > > Define, "once in awhile [sic]". Every 2-3 months I make sure each drive is up to date. > It's certainly possible to do it, > but the very reason I went with boot arrays rather than boot partitions was > it was getting to be a pain to update the backup drives all the time. All the time vs once every 2-3 months. Even an out-of-date boot drive will allow me to boot the machine and get things fixed. > Almost every time a package is added or deleted, /etc gets updated. Keeping > different copies of the configuration files in /etc in the initrd and the > root partition is not the best of ideas, although if course it can be done. As I said I don't using an initrd. I've never learned how to build one and didn't need it if I didn't use RAID on /boot. I don't understand your comments about /etc as it's not kept in /boot. /etc, /, /home, and all other directories are on RAID. Only /boot isn't, so it needs only a kernel and grub. > Any package which must be available at boot *MUST* update initrd, and if > most distro packages are anything, it is update rich. > >> 2) I don't use RAID for swap. I let the kernel do that internally. I >> almost never swap out on my home server so trying to protect that with >> RAID for the few moments I might use it seems like overkill to me. > > I halfway agree. My servers almost never use any significant amount > of swap, and even my workstations only use it very occasionally. There have > been instances, however, where the swap has grown to be quite large. With > that in mind, and given the very small amount he has allocated for swap, one > might suggest a RAID0 array of the areas to be used for swap, or maybe an > LVM volume. > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
