December 2002
Intermediate to advanced
260 pages
9h 18m
English
Content preview from Managing RAID on LinuxBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Installing Directly to Software RAID
First, all /boot and / partitions must be on a RAID-1. So if you have only two disks, you can’t create a RAID-1 for /boot and root and then create a few RAID-0 partitions for /usr, /home, and /var. While some installers and the md driver will allow this, it’s strongly discouraged. There’s no reason that you couldn’t create non-boot and non-root partitions on separate arrays on a separate set of disks. However, considering the large size of even today’s smaller hard disks, it would be quite a waste of space to house only /boot and root filesystems on a two-disk RAID-1.
Second, always use LILO in combination with bootable software RAID devices. Although GRUB provides some limited support, it’s not as evolved as the support that LILO provides for md devices. Some installers might default to GRUB, so don’t forget to manually select LILO as necessary.
There’s also one drawback to direct installation to software RAID. Since RAID-1 is a requirement for booting, that means initial synchronization for every partition you create must occur in parallel with the installation process. This increases the time it takes to install the system. But the benefits of RAID-1 do provide a reward for this imposition.
Red Hat
Red Hat has supported software RAID directly in its installation process for some time. That means system administrators don’t need to go through all of the extra steps that I’m about to outline when using Red Hat for a first-time installation onto ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.