From bounce-debian-user=aoga=Mail.Linux-Consulting.com@lists.debian.org Mon Feb 4 09:08:02 2002 Return-Path: Received: from murphy.debian.org (murphy.debian.org [216.234.231.6]) by Mail.Linux-Consulting.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id JAA00453 for ; Mon, 4 Feb 2002 09:08:02 -0800 Resent-Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 09:08:02 -0800 Received: (qmail 15732 invoked by uid 38); 4 Feb 2002 17:07:56 -0000 X-Envelope-Sender: george@parmastocks.com Received: (qmail 15335 invoked from network); 4 Feb 2002 17:07:46 -0000 Received: from parmastocks.cylink.com.cy (HELO phobos.internal.parmastocks.com) (194.42.135.92) by murphy.debian.org with SMTP; 4 Feb 2002 17:07:46 -0000 Received: from george (helo=localhost) by phobos.internal.parmastocks.com with local-esmtp (Exim 3.32 #1 (Debian)) id 16XmZz-0001s5-00; Mon, 04 Feb 2002 19:06:55 +0200 Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 19:06:54 +0200 (EET) From: George Karaolides X-X-Sender: george@phobos.internal.parmastocks.com To: John Pochmara cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Woody root on RAID and 2.4.17 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: George Karaolides Resent-Message-ID: Resent-From: debian-user@lists.debian.org X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/195231 X-Loop: debian-user@lists.debian.org Precedence: list Resent-Sender: debian-user-request@lists.debian.org Status: RO X-Status: Hi John, You came up trumps. Your pointers got me running woody with root on software RAID. Thanks! STOP PRESS: I've now got woody with root fs on LVM on software RAID-1. The ultimate server weapon... Watch this space. I'd like to write all this up in an informal HOWTO which I'll put up on my site. I would like to give you credit for your RAID-lilo pointers. Would you like me to put up your email address in the credits or not? If you'd like me to include any other details, please forward them. I did it differently to how you suggest, in a way that leaves lilo.conf, fstab, /boot and the MBR on the single disk we start from completely untouched and may even be a bit easier to do. The key is editing the lilo.conf copied to the RAID only, and doing chroot [target] /sbin/lilo to install an MBR to a disk other than the one with the initial single-disk install. Starting with an initial install to a single disk, it goes a bit like this: /dev/md[boot]: RAID-1 array for /boot fs /dev/md[root]: RAID-[1|4|5] array for root fs (I've only tried RAID-1 but I'm confident RAID-4 and -5 will work too). /dev/[h|s]d[raid-mbr]: Disk to whose MBR we will install lilo for the RAID system; must not be the disk to which we make the initial single-disk install. - We install to a single disk. It makes things simpler if this disk is partitioned the same way as the others will be. Set the BIOS to boot from this disk and install. - Obtain or compile a RAID kernel and reboot with it. - Install raidtools-2. - If you're going to be using 2.4.x with devfs, install devfsd. - Write an /etc/raidtab with the partitions on the disk we've just installed to marked as "failed-disk". Make sure these entries are not the first ones in each array. - Create the RAID arrays: raidstart /dev/md[number] - Make filesystems on them: mk[e2fs|reiserfs] /dev/md[number] - Mount the RAID array which will be used as the root fs under /mnt mount /dev/md[root] /mnt - Copy the root filesystem to it: tar cplf - -C / . | tar xvpf - -C /mnt - - Mount the other raid arrays under /mnt: /mnt/boot, /mnt/usr etc. Instead of issuing all those "mount" commands, you might as well put these mounts in /etc/fstab and do: mount -a In that way, they get mounted automatically in case you need to reboot into the single-disk system and work on them. - Copy the other filesystems to the corresponding arrays: tar cplf - -C / [boot|tmp|usr|other] | tar xvpf - -C /mnt - Edit /mnt/etc/lilo.conf and include: --- begin relevant lilo.conf excerpt --- # The disk we will install the RAID MBR to. # We should leave the MBR on the initial install # disk alone until we've successfully booted from RAID, # so choose another disk. disk=/dev/[h|s]d[raid-mbr] # We will use the BIOS to switch this disk to the # first BIOS id when we want to boot from it. bios=0x80 # The RAID-1 array for the /boot filesystem boot=/dev/md[boot] # Write the RAID MBR to the above disk only raid-also-boot="/dev/[h|s]d[raid-mbr]" # Root filesystem device root=/dev/md2 --- end relevant lilo.conf excerpt --- - Install lilo to the disk we've chosen to hold the RAID MBR: chroot /mnt /sbin/lilo - Edit /mnt/etc/fstab to mount the RAID filesystems instead of the single-disk ones. - Reboot, go into setup and change the BIOS settings to boot from the disk we've installed the RAID MBR to. - Boot into the RAID system. If something goes wrong, use the BIOS setup to get the system to boot the disk with the initial installation and fix it. - Once booted into the raid system, edit lilo.conf and change it so the MBR is installed to all disks in the array. More details later when I've verified I can use the BIOS setup to boot from any one of the disks. - Edit /etc/raidtab and change the "failed-disk" entries to "raid-disk". Add the partitions on the disk with the single-disk installation to the arrays with raidhotadd. - Run lilo and reboot to check that you can now boot from any of the disks. - Celebrate appropriately. Thanks again and best regards, | George Karaolides 8, Costakis Pantelides St., | | tel: +357 99 68 08 86 Strovolos, | | email: george@karaolides.com Nicosia CY 2057, | | web: www.karaolides.com Republic of Cyprus | -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org