[lug] RAID installation on Fedora 6 Zod

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 02:40:52PM -0600, User Dan Ferris wrote:
>I was saying Linux software RAID is harder compared to Solaris software 
>RAID and FreeBSD's software RAID because it's much harder to set it up 
>after the OS is installed.  With metainit and gmirror you can create arrays 
>without dealing with copying things from disk to disk.

The first hit on google for "gmirror" says:

   It made more sense to me to configure RAID during the install of the
   operating system.

The man page for gmirror says that it uses on-disc meta-data, so you can't
just lay it down on an existing file-system unless there's room for the
meta-data there already.  Which makes it sound like you'd run into the same
problems as with Linux software RAID, which also uses on-disc meta-data.
Of course, in Linux you can also build arrays without using the on-disc
meta-data, meaning that you can mirror a partition without modifying it at
all...  However, I wouldn't recommend it.

Getting back to the original poster, I'm assuming that if you are asking on
a mailing list about doing it on a recently installed machine that "let the
installer take care of it" is an answer that is likely to meet their needs.
I don't have time to document how you would go about doing this, but I do
have time to suggest this, possibly overlooked, option.

Sean
-- 
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Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability