[ale] Continuing Saga of Centos 5.6

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Wed Aug 10 14:37:59 EDT 2011


Good bunch of data!

OK. so the 3ware is the first drive. RHEL will try to make that the boot
drive as that's most likely the way the BIOS is setup. But your's is likely
different
The 2 WD drives you want as a software RAID1 and the 3ware drives for data
drives.

My way of this:

During drive selection choose sdb for MBR/boot drive
at the partitioning screen during install: delete ALL partitions.
create a 500MB part on sdb (WD1) as type software RAID
repeat for sdc.
create 1/2 swap on WD1
repeat for WD2
create new RAID device from them as type 1 and mounted at /boot
create LVM PV on remaining WD1
repeat for WD2
create LVM VG from those two partitions
setup / on new VG
create partition on SDA/3ware for data and make a mount point. (If it's not
in the drop down list, the first boot will not mount it, go in and create
the missing mount tree parts and 'mount -a' will succeed. Typical local
system data is in /opt or /var on RHEL)

The "official" RHEL way is put swap in the LVM container so it can be grown
if more RAM is added later. It makes sense but I prefer to have swap managed
only by swap. Putting it on two spindles makes for a nice speedup if used
and disaster if one drive fails. Putting swap on software RAID1 drives in an
LVM is a write speed hit but a no-crash setup on swap read.

A complicated swap setup I once was involved in: 3 drives, 6 partitions
total, 2 per drive. Each of the pairs was part of a mirror with the other
two. So sda1/sdb1, sda2/sdc2, sdb2/sdc1 were mirror pairs. Those 3 RAID1s
were then swap1, swap2, swap3. Swap will auto-stripe across multiple
partitions (so NEVER use two parts on same drive!). As RAID1 will allow for
asyncronous writes, each full strip was done in two steps, first with first
stripe write controlled by RAID, the second by the RAID process itself to
sync the drives. A new write take precedent over a sync write. So a software
RAID 10 on swap.

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Greg Clifton <gccfof5 at gmail.com> wrote:

> When I did the initial install, the installer saw the 3Ware mirror set as
> the primary drive and wanted to install there, I told it to install to the
> WD drives and then went with defaults. I am an amateur at this, so I
> probably hosed something but when I started over and chose install it read
> the existing install and shows the following:
>
> SDA 953663MB AMCC [i.e. 3Ware] 9650Se-2LP disk
> SDB 239422 ATA WDC WD2503ABYX-0
> SDC 239422 ATA WDC WD2503ABYX-0
>
> LVM Groups 00 14320320MB
>  Logvol 00 / ext3 1426368
>  Logvol 01  swap 5952Mb
>
> Hard Drives
> /dev/sda1 volgroup 00 LVM PV 953663MB Start 1 End 121575
> /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1 / boot ext 3 101MB Start 1 End 13
> /dev/sdb2 volgroup 01 LVM PV 239319MB Start 14 End 30522
> /dev/sdc1 volgroup 00 LVM PV 239429MB Start 1 End 30522
>
> I do recall there used to be a lot of trouble getting software RAID running
> off the motherboard controllers under Linux. Is it possible that we need a
> driver for this Intel SATA controller that is not on the install disc (BTW
> the machine is not plugged into the internet at this time, static IPs here
> and I'm not sure how to configure that during the install)?
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at water.com>wrote:
>
>> I'm pretty sure you can't do /boot on LVM in RHEL/CentOS given that even
>> when they default to an LVM layout during install they still always create
>> /boot as the first hard partition and put LVM as the second hard partition.
>>
>> Every RHEL/CENTOS server we have has /boot on a partition rather than an
>> LV for this reason.  Never tried forcing it to LVM.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
>> Michael B. Trausch
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 10:12 AM
>> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
>> Subject: Re: [ale] Continuing Saga of Centos 5.6
>>
>> On 08/10/2011 09:33 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> > Even Fedora 15 still uses Grub v1.
>> >
>> > It's sufficiently different that Red Hat hasn't switched over.
>>
>> A shame, really.  GRUB 2 is far superior in every way.
>>
>>        --- Mike
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>>
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>>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
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