On Tue, Feb 23, 1999 at 05:43:15PM -0000, Bruno Prior wrote:
> It's not bullet-proof, but couldn't you get a reasonable degree of fault-tolerance
> with the following RAID-1 setup:
>
> Install LILO on the MBR of both disks. On the second disk's lilo.conf, use the
> bios=0x80 trick to make sure you can boot from this if the first disk fails
> completely. On the first disk's lilo.conf, make the default option be to look for the
> kernel etc. on the 2nd disk. Add another option (let's give it the label "normal") to
> boot from the first disk, with an append line which includes "panic=30" (or however
> long you want to give it). Add a "lilo -R normal" line to the shutdown script. Now,
> if disk one fails completely, the system should boot from the second disk. If disk
> one develops an error, it should reboot if the kernel panics on bootup and this time
> load from disk two. (I haven't tried this, but I guess you could get the same effect
> using LILO's "fallback" option.) The event which this setup cannot handle is
> corruption of the MBR on disk one, but I don't think you will get perfection without
> going to hardware RAID or server-clustering. However, I would have thought this is
> security enough for the majority of applications.
looks like a good idea
i think fallback should work as well, you may still need a 'lilo -R' maybe at
the end of sysinit, if you don't want it to boot from a different disk
at every boot, but that might not be a bad side effect, i'd be sure to
set all images to 'optional' n lilo.conf or you might get a page of
L02020202020202020202.....
The other problem is that lilo does not only store info in the MBR,
it stores all settings and the position of blocks of the kernel/initrd files
in /boot/map, and that too can become corrupted.
Regards,
Luca
--
Luca Berra -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
System and Network Manager - CoMedia s.r.l.
