On 07/23 11:40 , Les Mikesell wrote: > Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > The advantage of starting with knoppix would be its excellent hardware > detection at boot time. With a tar image you need fairly similar > hardware plus some tweaking to make it bootable.
I'm not proposing that he shouldn't use Knoppix for the OS that hosts his offsite server; I'm just suggesting that if the Knoppix installer can't deal with installing to a software RAID array in exactly the fashion he wants, a workaround is to build the system somewhere else and then clone it onto a set of hardware that is set up the way he wants (the RAID setup being done 'by hand' after booting the target hardware with a Knoppix CD). Of course, it may be that he can just set up the hardware from the Knoppix CD with the RAID array as he likes, and tell the installer to install to /dev/md0, at which point things should be fairly happy. (Build the /etc/raidtab on the target system by hand, write the bootloaders by hand, and that should make it work). What this comes down to is that I don't know if the Knoppix installer can handle software RAID. I do my best to avoid software RAID; it's too much pain when things go wrong, in my experience. 3ware is the only way to go for RAID. These are special circumstances tho -- where one wants to be able to deliberately break the RAID mirror and run on one drive. Hmm, come to think of it; it wouldn't be entirely insensible to do it with a 3ware hardware RAID controller anyway. Here's what just occurred to me: - Build your offsite backup server with a 3ware controller and a RAID1 array. - Keep a spare 2-port RAID controller on hand. - When things go wrong, mail the disk and the controller to the remote site - Have them plug in the disk and controller, then boot. 3ware won't let you build a partial array; all the drives need to be in and functioning in order to set them up. It will let you boot on just one disk tho; and the configuration data is written to the disk, not the controller -- so you can put the drives on a completely different controller and they'll still work. I do realize that this is more expensive and less convenient than software RAID in theory; but I have had entirely too many bad experiences with software RAID and I far prefer the speed and manageability of 3ware hardware RAID. So I'm just throwing that idea out for discussion. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
