On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 06:16:49PM +0100, Toni Mueller wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've managed to get myself into the ugly position of needing to do a
> remote source upgrade from 3.9 to 4.0. Reason: Using RAIDFRAME on an
> architecture I don't have handy over here...
>
> Do I have to take care about more issues than are covered in FAQ4+5?
>
> Or even better, can I somehow mount partitions within a RAID type
> partition from a GENERIC kernel (sans having RAID protection in that
> case, with a rebuild after that)?
Depending on whether you are feeling lucky, very familiar with
RAIDframe, and have good backups, there might be a comparatively simple
solution.
On RAID levels other than 0, you can always fail a disk without losing
data. If you are additionally using RAID-1, you could make a non-RAID
copy of your data on the failed component. (The same applies to higher
RAID levels, of course, but your data must fit on only one disk, as you
cannot fail more without risking data loss. Of course, you can compress
them, so if you're lucky you might be able to get a 3-disk RAID-5 system
on only one disk. And you can of course get tricky by distributing those
compressed copies over multiple disks.)
Alternatively, if you have the capacity to make good backups and
tolerate some downtime, just make those backups, wipe and reinstall,
then restore as necessary. If you already have a good backup-and-restore
procedure in place, this shouldn't be too difficult; if not, it might be
somewhat painful (burning stacks of CDs?).
Of course, you can try to do it the hard way, but that might be
difficult. Just how much of the system is on RAID, anyway? Could you get
some non-RAID disk available, possibly via the above technique? Do you
have any other machines available, albeit of a different architecture?
Finally, consider networked filesystems. If you can get GENERIC to boot,
and get NFS (preferably over IPsec, or even SSH) running, or AFS or
whatever you like, you should be in good shape.
Joachim
