Dear fellow software-raid-users,
Hopefully someone can help my out with their experience.
Since I am not a die-hard linux user, and are not very familiar with the
kernel modules loaded during initrd.
Normally I install software raid1 on all servers I get my hands on (if it
does not have a raid controller.)
I always use Debian, and their installer makes creating a raid 1 setup easy.
Now recently I switched two servers from a single disk setup to a raid1
setup on a running setup, without the installer.
Yesterday I did a apt-get update / apt-get upgrade, and got myself a shiny
new kernel package.
After rebooting that system was in a lockdown.
Stupid me! I didn't check the menu.lst of my grub, and apperantly aptitude
rebuilded the initrd for the new kernel.
The sysadmin I got the server managed to het the md device back online and I
can now access my server again trough ssh.
I wish to avoid this kind of problems in the future (and I prefere never to
upgrade the kernel on a running machine again ;-))
However since it is smart to sometimes make those changes, I was wondering
if there is a way to test if my machine will boot without actually booting
it?
I checked up again with the raid1 turotials I used, and re-created the
initramdisk. (I noticed that I lost the /etc/default/modules lines for md
and raid1.)
What steps should I take in account to make sure my raid1 array is always
bootable?
#My menu.list for grub:
default 0
fallback 1
#And the stanza's:
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686 RAID (hd1)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/md0 ro quiet
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686
## ## End Default Options ##
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686
#And my /etc/initramfs-tools/modules:
raid1
md
#And my /etc/modules
loop
raid1
md
An other questions I would like to ask is the following.
Since Grub loads the initrd-image from one of the two disks, if one fails,
it won't boot the md root device anyway right?
Is it that whel /dev/sda fails, /dev/sdb becomes /dev/sda? (or must I state
that hd1 becomes hd0 when hd0 has failed?)
This because I would prefere a stanza that always boots up in degraded mode,
rather then in a panic kernel mode ;-)
I have seen stanza's containing both disksk within one stanza, don't know if
this is old or still supported?
Thanks for your time to read and hopefully reply!
Regards,
Armand
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