[lug] RAID installation on Fedora 6 Zod

[Nate Duehr]

On May 12, 2007, at 4:47 AM, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

>> Also Sun makes hot swapping disks SO much easier than in Linux, but I
>> digress.
>
> It's hard to imagine that it's easier than "mdadm --manage /dev/md0  
> --add
> /dev/sda1".

How about, under most "normal" disk replacements, zero commands typed  
at all, other than if you want to monitor the rebuild?  That'd be  
normal for most hardware based arrays.   Nothing.  You just put the  
disk in.

The idea here is that a former lawn-sprinkler technician could do  
it... and I think a few of the on-site guy's we've seen recently from  
Sun match that description, unfortunately.  They're scared of their  
own shadows and all they know is how to physically pull out a disk,  
compare model numbers with the one in their hand, write down the  
serial numbers, and stuff the new one into the system.

For software, all I can speak to is Veritas... fire up a menu, select  
option #4 (remove a disk for replacement), pick the failing disk from  
a list.  Tell the guy on-site to put in the new disk, fire up the  
menu again, select option #5 (replace a removed/failing disk)...  
select the only removed disk (the one you just took out)... done.  If  
you like, you can monitor it's progress with vxtask.

Actually there's one more command in-between if the disk isn't "seen"  
by the OS, but they've fixed that in later versions... remember, I'm  
on almost 5-7 year old stuff.  In fact, the version I'm on is so old  
it's end-of-lifed.

But it did all this stuff gracefully many many years ago.  Linux is  
only just now really getting stable/good at this type of thing, and  
it still requires too much manual intervention and knowledge of the  
system... in this newer commercial "stuff", you don't need to know  
anything, really.

The newer commercial gadgets are even easier.  For example (one I've  
used before)... the NetApp Filers are bloody amazing... they're as  
close to "hands off" as it gets.  The silly things open their own  
RMA's.  I've had NetApp on-site techs show up and tell me that a disk  
hadn't failed yet, but was about to, and they had the replacement  
under their arm.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com