Hi Jim, On 05/21/2013 06:22 PM, Jim Santos wrote: > Hi, > > Thanks for pointing out the initramfs problem. I guess I should have > figured that out myself, since I've had to update initramfs in the > past, but it just totally slipped my mind. And the strange device > numbering just threw me complete off track. Does this mean you're back to running? Did you follow my instructions? > As far as how the devices got numbered that way in the first place, I > really don't know. I assembled them and that is how it came out. > Since I was initially doing this to learn about SW RAID, I'm sure that > I made a rookie mistake or two along the way. No problem. You probably rebooted once between creating all your raids and generating the mdadm.conf file. (Using mdadm -Es >>/etc/mdadm.conf) The reboot would have cause initramfs assembly without instructions, using available minors starting at 127. Then the --scan into mdadm.conf would have "locked it in". > The reason that there are so many filesystems is that I wanted to try > to minimize any loss if one of them got corrupted. Maybe it isn't the > best way to do it, but it made sense to me at the time. I am more > than open to suggestions. > > When I started doing this to better understand SW RAID, I wanted to > make things as simple as possible so I didn't use the LVM. That and > it didn't seem like I would gain much by using it. Al I need is > simple RAID1 devices I never planned on changing the layout other than > maybe increasing the size of the disks. Maybe that flies in the face > of 'best practices', since you can be sure what your future needs > would be. How would you suggest I set things up if I did use LVs? Simple is good. My preferred setup for light duty is two arrays spread over all available disks. First is /dev/md1, a small (~500m) n-way mirror with v1.0 metadata for use as /boot. The other, /dev/md2, uses the balance of the disks in either raid10,far3 or raid6. If raid6, I use a chunk size of 16k. I put LVM on top of /dev/md2, with LVs for swap, /, /home, /tmp, and /bulk. The latter is for photos, music, video, mythtv, et cetera. I generally leave 10% of the volume group unallocated until I see how the usage patterns go. LVM makes it easy to add space to existing LVs on the run--even for the root filesystem. LVM also makes it possible to move LVs from one array to another without downtime. This is especially handy when you have a root filesystem inside a raid10. (MD raid10 cannot be reshaped yet.) Anyways, you asked my opinion. I don't run any heavy duty systems, so look to others for those situations. > /boot and / are on a separate disk on RAID1 devices with 1.x > superblocks. At the moment, they are the only thing that aren't > giving me a problem :-) I guess that means the answers to my first questions are no? Phil ps. The convention on kernel.org is to use reply-to-all, to trim replies, and to either bottom-post or interleave. FWIW. -- 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
