Mirroring

I (BenScott) think we should mirror the two disks (RAID level 1). There is no service contract or tech support, physical access is limited, and we have limited manpower and no budget. A disk failure could knock us offline for weeks. At the same time, our current disk usage is small.

While I always prefer hardware RAID for the boot drive, the server does not have a controller, and we have no money to buy one. So, that means software RAID, which, as far as I know, does work pretty well on Linux. However I haven't done one of these in a long time, and never with GRUB. Do others have recent experience?

-- BenScott - 10 Feb 2006

I second the SW RAID 1 suggestion, and have used SW RAID extensively including for boot. grub can deal with booting from either disk, though you do have to install it twice (once on each MBR.) Are there details on space available in the machine? (I'm assuming there's not much left in a 1U...) - If there's room, I can volunteer an 80 GB IDE for backups/bulk storage etc. Note that both the RAID personality and the IDE controller driver must be compiled into the kernel for this.

-- DrewVanZandt - 10 Feb 2006

The only physical space not consumed is around the two open PCI slots. Check out the link to Intel's site on the ServerHardware page; Intel provides extensive docs. I do hope to have detailed tech listings and some photos up this weekend.

-- BenScott - 10 Feb 2006

LVM

I'm learning towards using LVM to create containers for each partition. That gives us the flexibility to re-organize our partitions and such later on. Given that our plans for the future are very much up in the air, that is a real benefit. Anyone have any objections or suggestions with LVM? -- BenScott - 10 Feb 2006

Partition and directory layout

This topic tends to invite holy wars. That's usually a sign that the topic lacks objective, one-size-fits-all criteria. Please keep that in mind as we all put forth our preferences and opinions. -- BenScott - 10 Feb 2006

Here's the first "holy salvo"... Put everything (except swap) in one partition. Why? There's no good reason not too (unless we're going to use dump/restore to tapes). -- BruceDawson - 10 Feb 2006