Op 20-05-11 21:13, Ed W schreef: > On 20/05/2011 09:33, Paul van der Vlis wrote: >> You can select the "boot device priority" where you can choose about >> devices types (DVD, harddisk, USB, network) but you can choose only one >> SATA disk. Study it, and you will see I am right. I've asked it to my >> rackserver-vendor, they say: "that's always the case". > > Hi, what I have done with all my supermicro servers is to buy a tiny USB > flash drive (physically small, not capacity small) - I think what I > bought might be one of the tiny PNY devices, not sure though > > The Supermicro boards have internal USB headers mounted on the > motherboard, even with a 1U server I have plenty of room to install my > USB on the MB (could stick them out the back of the server and cable tie > them (or superglue them)) Nice to hear. > Then I put SysrescueCD on my stick and setup GRUB with a bunch of boot > options. > > In my case I'm under the possibly misguided apprehension that my boot > will fail over to the spare disks if one fails. However, I can set the > subsequent failover to be my USB stick also. I think I have them set at > the moment that the USB stick boots the main drives as normal, but has a > boot menu where I can also boot the sysrescueimage if I need to (I use > this (over IPMI) for initial system installation and serious > maintenance, eg failed grub upgrade or similar). Interesting. > The only other option that I think the big hosting guys use is to have a > netboot setup which boots everything and can also offer rescue images, > etc. Beyond my skills to setup for my meagre number of servers, but if > you have more than a couple of machines this could be a very good solution? I don't have much machines, but I have my own IPv4 range. So it is possible. > For my needs the USB stick option is perfect I will think about it. A little disadvantage is that it's not so easy to have access to the USB stick maybe (you have to open the machine). > Sysrescuecd suits me because all my servers are gentoo based - clearly > it will work for other distros also, but you might want to evaluate > other rescue distros before choosing one? I use Debian, so I think I would choose a Debian-based rescue system. What still a question is for me: Is it better to put /boot on such an usb-stick or only the MBR? Grub2 can boot from lvm/raid, and when I would have /boot on disk I can have an MBR on disks too (for the case the usb stick would fail). But difficult for me to understand that things like the initrd comes from a software raid.... Another way would be make a /boot on a raid1 with 3 devices: the harddisks and the USB stick. With regards, Paul van der Vlis. -- http://www.vandervlis.nl/ -- 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
