RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to help if your PS fails. That's a very good point never thought of that. Acrtually this RAID 1 setup I'm planning is for my desktop machine, problem is is's not built like a server so there is not the traditional slid in bay for a second PS as do many 1 and 2u rack servers have. Unless there is some specialty product available that somehow fits in to a tower case. Could you reccomend a redundant PS for a desktop machine (if they exist)? _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to help if your PS fails. redundant power supplies connected to redundant UPS's. I've seen more UPS failures than I've ever had failed PSUs on proper server grade hardware. This might be getting a bit elaborate for a desktop machine. I really want RAID because I'm tired every couple years of hard drive crashes and having to start from scratch and spending a week setting up new drives and getting my design software back on line and trying to recover data. What do you think of alternative back up systems, such as a tape backup with bare metal restore software? I'd go that route instead if I could fine a solution which would allow me to restore to different hardware, i.e. if my motherboard dies and I need to buy a different brand or model MB. I know Storix back up software has this capability - I use storix on my Linux server with RAID 1. @ home I have one Linux and one Windows desktop machine. _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese, You are definitely making your life more difficult then is needed for a desktop machine. You said you have 4 hard disks. Make a software RAID1 out of the first two. Make a software RAID1 out of the second two and your good to go. You can use dump/restore to backup the logical volumes on the second RAID set to an LV on the first. No need for bare metal restore. Just need to get some working Linux distro to be able to read your files. Going HW RAID for your desktop is going to get in the way of you getting things going and if your HW RAID card fails then what? Your drives will only work with another identical HW RAID card. -Ross - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Sent: Fri Mar 14 09:08:39 2008 Subject: RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to help if your PS fails. redundant power supplies connected to redundant UPS's. I've seen more UPS failures than I've ever had failed PSUs on proper server grade hardware. This might be getting a bit elaborate for a desktop machine. I really want RAID because I'm tired every couple years of hard drive crashes and having to start from scratch and spending a week setting up new drives and getting my design software back on line and trying to recover data. What do you think of alternative back up systems, such as a tape backup with bare metal restore software? I'd go that route instead if I could fine a solution which would allow me to restore to different hardware, i.e. if my motherboard dies and I need to buy a different brand or model MB. I know Storix back up software has this capability - I use storix on my Linux server with RAID 1. @ home I have one Linux and one Windows desktop machine. _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
This is getting OT and you are going to end up spending more on redundancy then if you just called Dell and ordered another computer. - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Sent: Fri Mar 14 09:31:00 2008 Subject: RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box That is true, buy high quality stuff up front for fewer problems down the road. Not a sure bet, but a better one. In the half dozen systems I've been running at home for the past several years none of them have suffered a hardware failure of any kind(fortunately). I've been running PC Power and Cooling power supplies for about 9 years now, really high quality PSUs(last one I bought was about 4 years ago, can't speak for their quality now). So for a top quality power supply for a mission critical desktop machine, which brand(s) would you reccomend? One of the towers I have is a Thermaltake Xaser 3 with lots of room, and I just bought a new Antec Sonata III tower with a 500 watt PS. So BBU is certainly a nice thing to have but at least in my experience isn't absolutely critical. Then for a Mission critical desktop machine, if you had to make a choice, would you go with a good quality UPS and/or redundant power supplies, or a BBU instead? Of course for absolutely critical things I don't use server-based RAID anyways. Multiple redundant controllers, multiple redundant paths(to both the disks and to the hosts), is the way to go(assuming your application(s) aren't built to be able to run on something like a distributed file system). I've seen that some of the latest HP servers have dual ported SAS disks, which sounds pretty neat. I assume they still only have one controller though. As an alternative to RAID1 for a mission critical desktop machine @ home, what would you reccomend? Maybe a bare metal restore solution able to restore to different hardware, (i.e. if a motherboard dies and drive crashes due to power spike or some catastrophe, I'm screwed if I can't find the exact same make - model)? _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
That's a very good point never thought of that. Acrtually this RAID 1 setup I'm planning is for my desktop machine, problem is is's not built like a server so there is not the traditional slid in bay for a second PS as do many 1 and 2u rack servers have. Unless there is some specialty product available that somehow fits in to a tower case. Could you reccomend a redundant PS for a desktop machine (if they exist)? The whole system needs to be designed for dual supplies. You can't just plop down two power supplies in parallel without some circuitry that attempts to monitor balance them out. Yes I realize that thanks, just wondered if there was some new product combo out there for existing towers, i.e. dual power supplies with controller boards, from your comment I assume there is not. I'd be willing to migrate all of my hardware, i.e. motherboard, monitor card etc, to a new case, if I could find a case which includes a controller card for the power supplies, or a case that comes complete with such. I'm curious - why does your desktop needs so much redundancy ? Because I use the desktop machines about ten hours a day, I work out of home, doing graphic design, web design, uploading files to server, managing server, etc. The home desktop machines are just as mission critical as the server I upload to is. Maybe more so, because if there is a problem server side, I need remote access to it 24/7. _ Climb to the top of the charts! Play the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_jan___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to help if your PS fails. That's a very good point never thought of that. Acrtually this RAID 1 setup I'm planning is for my desktop machine, problem is is's not built like a server so there is not the traditional slid in bay for a second PS as do many 1 and 2u rack servers have. Unless there is some specialty product available that somehow fits in to a tower case. Could you reccomend a redundant PS for a desktop machine (if they exist)? The whole system needs to be designed for dual supplies. You can't just plop down two power supplies in parallel without some circuitry that attempts to monitor balance them out. I'm curious - why does your desktop needs so much redundancy ? Just for fun, the first hit on a google for redundant atx power supply http://www.directron.com/tc400r8.html Seems you can just plop one into your std atx chassis . . . Hey thank's that's pretty cool, I'll check it out! _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
This is getting OT and you are going to end up spending more on redundancy then if you just called Dell and ordered another computer. I agree with you in that it's cheaper to buy another home computer than to design a system with redundancy. However that new conputer I would order from Dell probabally would not have the redundancy I need in a a workstation, and I would just end up back where I started anyway. I think you missed my point. If workstation A fails, call Dell and have another one overnighted, or call Dell today and order a second workstation to have as a backup or act as a secondary workstation. Their Vostros line is cheap (in appearance, components and price), but is functional, performs well and did I say cheap already, so you can get 2 for the price of 1 highly redundant system. Ah I got it now thanks. Does the Vostros come with either a bare metal restore tape backup system or RAID ( which is required for my situation)? _ Climb to the top of the charts! Play the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_jan___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
You are definitely making your life more difficult then is needed for a desktop machine. You said you have 4 hard disks. Make a software RAID1 out of the first two. Make a software RAID1 out of the second two and your good to go. You can use dump/restore to backup the logical volumes on the second RAID set to an LV on the first. No need for bare metal restore. Just need to get some working Linux distro to be able to read your files. Going HW RAID for your desktop is going to get in the way of you getting things going and if your HW RAID card fails then what? Your drives will only work with another identical HW RAID card. -Ross That makes total sense Ross, I think I may end up going with software raid and investing in a good hot swap redundant power supply that would fit into an ATX case, combined with a good UPS. That brings up a last question on possiblity of either a 3ware or acrea RAID 1 cards. I'm wondering how long I would be able to order a replacement RAID card from either of 3ware or areea. Anyone know if 3ware or acrea stock identical replacement cards for their SATA 4 port raid cards for several years out? Do they stock past the three year warranty period? _ Helping your favorite cause is as easy as instant messaging. You IM, we give. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Home/?source=text_hotmail_join___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: This is getting OT and you are going to end up spending more on redundancy then if you just called Dell and ordered another computer. I agree with you in that it's cheaper to buy another home computer than to design a system with redundancy. However that new conputer I would order from Dell probabally would not have the redundancy I need in a a workstation, and I would just end up back where I started anyway. I think you missed my point. If workstation A fails, call Dell and have another one overnighted, or call Dell today and order a second workstation to have as a backup or act as a secondary workstation. Their Vostros line is cheap (in appearance, components and price), but is functional, performs well and did I say cheap already, so you can get 2 for the price of 1 highly redundant system. Ah I got it now thanks. Does the Vostros come with either a bare metal restore tape backup system or RAID ( which is required for my situation)? They will sell you the moon if you want, but let me give you some practical advice. You seem like you are running your own consulting business, so this advice will not only save you time, but money which is key when running your own business. Buy your computers with NO hardware RAID, your not setting up high performance database systems for hundreds of users here. Get systems with 2 identical internal 250GB SATA drives and setup software RAID1 on them. Get an external USB/Firewire drive, you can even get those in RAID1 too and have automated dump scripts backup your data to it. Install your Linux distro with common reproduceable options using standard repos and document it. Here's how I would setup the internal hard drives, can be done easily through anaconda even with kickstart. /dev/sda1 - 100MB RAID /dev/sda2 - Rest of Disk RAID /dev/sdb1 - 100MB RAID /dev/sdb2 - Rest of Disk RAID /dev/md0 - /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 RAID1, ext3, /boot /dev/md1 - /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 RAID1, LVM VG CentOS - PV /dev/md1 LV root - VG CentOS, 16GB, ext3, / LV swap - VG CentOS, 4GB, swap LV home - VG CentOS, 32GB, ext3, /home LV work - VG CentOS, 64GB, ext3, /work If the system crashes you can move your USB drive over to the other system and restore there, and/or have rsync keep the other system identical to the first. Setup NIS/NFS or whatever to share the data/authentication information. This setup will be more cost effective and faster then what you are currently planning. -Ross __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:33:29 -0400 You are definitely making your life more difficult then is needed for a desktop machine. You said you have 4 hard disks. Make a software RAID1 out of the first two. Make a software RAID1 out of the second two and your good to go. You can use dump/restore to backup the logical volumes on the second RAID set to an LV on the first. No need for bare metal restore. Just need to get some working Linux distro to be able to read your files. Going HW RAID for your desktop is going to get in the way of you getting things going and if your HW RAID card fails then what? Your drives will only work with another identical HW RAID card. -Ross That makes total sense Ross, I think I may end up going with software raid and investing in a good hot swap redundant power supply that would fit into an ATX case, combined with a good UPS. That brings up a last question on possiblity of either a 3ware or acrea RAID 1 cards. I'm wondering how long I would be able to order a replacement RAID card from either of 3ware or areea. Anyone know if 3ware or acrea stock identical replacement cards for their SATA 4 port raid cards for several years out? Do they stock past the three year warranty period? ACTUALLY I totally forgot. I absoluteluy can not use software raid. Because I use Adobe products. Adobe products do not install well on software raid systems, and tend to crash on software raid beacuse of their activation process. If I go raid, I absolutely need a hardware raid which is entirely transparent to the operating system, at least as far as adobe products are concerned. _ Climb to the top of the charts! Play the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_jan___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
No, read this: my previous thread... Sorry, I can't access your Windows Live Hotmail inbox . . . Ah haha sorry was not paying attention, it's here: :) http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096054.html _ Need to know the score, the latest news, or you need your Hotmail®-get your fix. http://www.msnmobilefix.com/Default.aspx___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Sorry, I can't access your Windows Live Hotmail inbox . . . Ah haha sorry was not paying attention, it's here: :) http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096054.html OOPS - I need some more coffee this am - HERE is the correct thread: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096063.html _ Climb to the top of the charts! Play the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_jan___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
I have two home workstation machines. One is Centos, and one is Windows (the one I use Adobe on). I'd prefer if possible to have the same type of RAID cards on both machines, because easier to manage and if I ever decide to sell or give away one machine, I can pull the raid card and use it as a backup. I've always considered this a huge advantage of software raid1. Even if everything on a machine melts except for one drive, you can recover the data from it and you don't need a special controller to do it. On windows, you need the server versions to do mirroring, though. If you can tolerate losing an hour's work or so, you could just schedule rsync commands to keep copies updated on another (perhaps external) drive or to another machine on the network - or get a Mac with it's 'time machine' backup. This approach is actually safer than RAID alone, since operator or software errors will wipe out your mirrored copy instantly as well with RAID. Unfortunately I can't use software RAID1 because of this: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096063.html _ Helping your favorite cause is as easy as instant messaging. You IM, we give. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Home/?source=text_hotmail_join___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: I have two home workstation machines. One is Centos, and one is Windows (the one I use Adobe on). I'd prefer if possible to have the same type of RAID cards on both machines, because easier to manage and if I ever decide to sell or give away one machine, I can pull the raid card and use it as a backup. I've always considered this a huge advantage of software raid1. Even if everything on a machine melts except for one drive, you can recover the data from it and you don't need a special controller to do it. On windows, you need the server versions to do mirroring, though. If you can tolerate losing an hour's work or so, you could just schedule rsync commands to keep copies updated on another (perhaps external) drive or to another machine on the network - or get a Mac with it's 'time machine' backup. This approach is actually safer than RAID alone, since operator or software errors will wipe out your mirrored copy instantly as well with RAID. Unfortunately I can't use software RAID1 because of this: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096063.html First, you should probably get your applications from a company that doesn't hate its customers... But aside from that, this restriction should only apply to the place where you install the app, not where you store your own work. Why don't you ghost-image (or use the free and very nice clonezilla-live) your system disk for a quick bare-metal restore, and put your own work on a separate raid-mirrored partition? And since you seem to be very paranoid about your disks, use some other backup mechanism like rsync to another location at some frequent intervals too. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: That brings up a last question on possiblity of either a 3ware or acrea RAID 1 cards. I'm wondering how long I would be able to order a replacement RAID card from either of 3ware or areea. Anyone know if 3ware or acrea stock identical replacement cards for their SATA 4 port raid cards for several years out? Do they stock past the three year warranty period? ACTUALLY I totally forgot. I absoluteluy can not use software raid. Because I use Adobe products. Adobe products do not install well on software raid systems, and tend to crash on software raid beacuse of their activation process. If I go raid, I absolutely need a hardware raid which is entirely transparent to the operating system, at least as far as adobe products are concerned. What Adobe products do you use under Linux? I did not know that Adobe offered products outside of Reader and Flash for Linux. Besides, where did you read that Adobe products don't work on RAID systems? The RAID part will be well hidden under the Logical Volume Manager even if the first is true. RAID1 can speed up sequential read speed, as a well designed RAID implementation can stripe the read requests across both spindles (and dm-raid does that!). Ah I figured someone would ask that. I use pretty much all major adobe products, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, just about the entire suite. I have two home workstation machines. One is Centos, and one is Windows (the one I use Adobe on). I'd prefer if possible to have the same type of RAID cards on both machines, because easier to manage and if I ever decide to sell or give away one machine, I can pull the raid card and use it as a backup. If you are a graphic designer, I'm curious what you use the CentOS box for (or why you use Windows and not Mac :-) From experience I have learned that Photoshop will not install on software raid on my W2K machine - I tried it two years ago, could not get it to install, and after a few days trying to get it to work, called Adobe tech support and at that time the tech support person told me that their products don't run on software raid because they don't want people having multiple copies of one license on a second drive (unless it's for their second copy allowance for a laptop or second machine owned by same person, and only one or the other - the laptop or second desktop are run at the same time - my second copy is on a laptop ). The Photoshop support tech was just shrugging you off here because he didn't want to support you. There exists no such stipulation in Adobe's EULA. As long as it is running on the machine it was licensed for and that machine's OS is supported then you are good. Running on RAID has nothing to do with second copies and second machine allowance as the storage medium is not the key in licensing, the processor(s) are. Adobe needn't even be installed on the local HD if you can get away with a network install and all that registry crap, but it better have a license for the CPU it's running on. I had run Adobe Photoshop on Windows 2000 Terminal Server running under software RAID with no problems (besides poor visual performance due to terminal services). Also I may at some time migrate my adobe products to the Linux machine and run Adobe on WINE on the Linux box. Google just started working with the folks over @ WINE, and they want to make it so all adobe products run flawlessly on Linux - WINE, not just photoshop and illustrator. Today some adobe products run on wine well, some don't, in a few years they all will run well on a linux box using WINE. I'm not sure about running adobe using software raid on a linux box and WINE - never tried it, but going with hareware raid on the linux box eliminates another possible unknown. Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. -Ross __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Unfortunately I can't use software RAID1 because of this: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096063.html First, you should probably get your applications from a company that doesn't hate its customers... But aside from that, this restriction should only apply to the place where you install the app, not where you store your own work. Why don't you ghost-image (or use the free and very nice clonezilla-live) your system disk for a quick bare-metal restore, and put your own work on a separate raid-mirrored partition? And since you seem to be very paranoid about your disks, use some other backup mechanism like rsync to another location at some frequent intervals too. Yeah I agree they are difficult to deal with sometimes. And expensive. I agree the restriction should only apply to the place where I install the application. I told them that two years ago and they said that's the way their software is designed, to prevent installation if RAID 1 is detected, that's what the tech support guy told me anyway. They want to prevent someone from taking a mirrored drive and giving it to someone else to use on a different machine. They told me this two years ago not sure if they have the same policy though - but my version is about two years old. I could clone just my data somehow on a seperate drive or backup (not the applications and OS), yet I also want to clone the entire OS and applications that's where most of the time goes into as far as restoring a disk or buying a new disk is concerned. I'm paranoid because I've had 3 crashes in the past 4 years and it's always a pain delays my work for days. SATA drives are made cheap compared to server grade SCSI's. _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Ross S. W. Walker wrote: Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. Or use parallels or vmware and run all 3 at once when you want... and let the built in time machine tool do backups to an external firewire or network drive. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Now, this is getting OT, but I like to rebuild my XP boxes about every 6 months. That's more than the 3 times in four years. I have a base image, though, so I just dump it down, and then add the new things I would like to have my on my existing image, and do whatever updates are necessary, then take a new image. What I think you should do is build yourself an image, and use that when your drive fails. Install XP, install all your software. Export your MSOffice registration registry key. Do the updates, get it current. Then, before you do anything else, take an image of it. This is a base image with your software on it. Keep it until you get new hardware. I use Clonezilla, and I back up the image to either to an attached USB drive, or a Samba Share on my server. Takes about 20 minutes to do about 30G on an 80G drive. Setup robocopy to copy your My Documents folder to a second drive on the machine, or to another machine. I backup to a samba server as part of a logon script. I have a couple of machines that use a scheduled task. I do use the /mir option, so if I hose something, it's my fault. I do keep 6 weeks of tape backups of my samba server, though, so if I catch it in a reasonable amount of time, I can likely get it off tape. Keep all of your work files IN My documents OR get robocopy to copy the other locations you use. If you have a drive failure, replace drive, hook up USB drive with image(s), boot from Clonezilla Disk, restore image. the Same 30G image take about 10 minutes to dump back down. these are Dell GX520's. Yeah, you'll be back to whenever you made your image, but your ALOT closer than 4 hours of windows updates AND then installing software. Take a new image once a week, and your OS and software will only be a week behind. Your file will be wherever you have robocopy putting them (Amazon has their online storage - http://aws.amazon.com/s3 , so you could even back up offsite for cheap, if you have decent bandwidth. All this work is pointless, if your place of business burns down. If you are running a business, you NEED to get your data offsite.) Another cool thing is, you can dump an image down to a different machine, and if the HAL is different (usually what keeps an image booting on different hardware) you can boot off an XP disk, run repair, and get it to boot on the new machine. It would be best to have an XP disk with SP2 already on it. (or slipstream your own..) Finally, buy server grade SATA disks. Yeah, I know it's not the same as SCSI, but there are -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Therese Trudeau Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 10:03 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box Unfortunately I can't use software RAID1 because of this: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096063.html First, you should probably get your applications from a company that doesn't hate its customers... But aside from that, this restriction should only apply to the place where you install the app, not where you store your own work. Why don't you ghost-image (or use the free and very nice clonezilla-live) your system disk for a quick bare-metal restore, and put your own work on a separate raid-mirrored partition? And since you seem to be very paranoid about your disks, use some other backup mechanism like rsync to another location at some frequent intervals too. Yeah I agree they are difficult to deal with sometimes. And expensive. I agree the restriction should only apply to the place where I install the application. I told them that two years ago and they said that's the way their software is designed, to prevent installation if RAID 1 is detected, that's what the tech support guy told me anyway. They want to prevent someone from taking a mirrored drive and giving it to someone else to use on a different machine. They told me this two years ago not sure if they have the same policy though - but my version is about two years old. I could clone just my data somehow on a seperate drive or backup (not the applications and OS), yet I also want to clone the entire OS and applications that's where most of the time goes into as far as restoring a disk or buying a new disk is concerned. I'm paranoid because I've had 3 crashes in the past 4 years and it's always a pain delays my work for days. SATA drives are made cheap compared to server grade SCSI's. _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008_ __ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Les Mikesell wrote: Ross S. W. Walker wrote: Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. Or use parallels or vmware and run all 3 at once when you want... and let the built in time machine tool do backups to an external firewire or network drive. Yes, even better. I think VMware sells a version of workstation for OS X now too. -Ross __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Ah I figured someone would ask that. I use pretty much all major adobe products, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, just about the entire suite. I have two home workstation machines. One is Centos, and one is Windows (the one I use Adobe on). I'd prefer if possible to have the same type of RAID cards on both machines, because easier to manage and if I ever decide to sell or give away one machine, I can pull the raid card and use it as a backup. If you are a graphic designer, I'm curious what you use the CentOS box for (or why you use Windows and not Mac :-) Good question when I started out I had windows so that's what I bought - Adobe windows versions. I'm considering migrating to Mac though because Adobe just started a new program where one can migrate to mac versions without paying full price for a new version - they used to charge full price for upgrades if one wanted to switch from Windows to mac. Now they just cancel out the windows version if one migrates to Mac. From experience I have learned that Photoshop will not install on software raid on my W2K machine - I tried it two years ago, could not get it to install, and after a few days trying to get it to work, called Adobe tech support and at that time the tech support person told me that their products don't run on software raid because they don't want people having multiple copies of one license on a second drive (unless it's for their second copy allowance for a laptop or second machine owned by same person, and only one or the other - the laptop or second desktop are run at the same time - my second copy is on a laptop ). The Photoshop support tech was just shrugging you off here because he didn't want to support you. There exists no such stipulation in Adobe's EULA. As long as it is running on the machine it was licensed for and that machine's OS is supported then you are good. Running on RAID has nothing to do with second copies and second machine allowance as the storage medium is not the key in licensing, the processor(s) are. Adobe needn't even be installed on the local HD if you can get away with a network install and all that registry crap, but it better have a license for the CPU it's running on. Just spoke with Adobe sales today checking into upgrade pricing. The sales guy said that the latest versions of all Adobe products would not install on software RAID systems, BUT he did say, if I bought a hardware raid system, then I would have no problem installing it because the OS and Adobe products do not see hardware raid. It may state in their EULA that there is no restriction running either software or hardware raid, but I have to go by what the sales department tells me. It's rediculous I know. I had run Adobe Photoshop on Windows 2000 Terminal Server running under software RAID with no problems (besides poor visual performance due to terminal services). That's great wish I could have gotten my apps to install a few years ago - at the time I tried doing it with the Adaptec 2120SA raid card which uses software raid drivers. It's a far cry from the 3ware true raid, yet I don't want to take the chance, set up true software raid, load my adobe products on disk and them find two or three years from now if I upgrade with a new version, that adobe has found a way to disable software raid compatability for all scenairos. Just curious, what version of photoshop were you using under your software raid setup? I tried it with Creative Suite 2 which includes photoshop. Also I may at some time migrate my adobe products to the Linux machine and run Adobe on WINE on the Linux box. Google just started working with the folks over @ WINE, and they want to make it so all adobe products run flawlessly on Linux - WINE, not just photoshop and illustrator. Today some adobe products run on wine well, some don't, in a few years they all will run well on a linux box using WINE. I'm not sure about running adobe using software raid on a linux box and WINE - never tried it, but going with hareware raid on the linux box eliminates another possible unknown. Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. Yes I think I will migrate over to mac instead of running adobe on wine, when I get the upgrade, makes much more sense. And set up a hardware RAID 1 on the new desktop mac. _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Ross S. W. Walker wrote: Les Mikesell wrote: Ross S. W. Walker wrote: Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. Or use parallels or vmware and run all 3 at once when you want... and let the built in time machine tool do backups to an external firewire or network drive. Yes, even better. I think VMware sells a version of workstation for OS X now too. Yes, and I think it will run VM's created under VMware server on linux or windows, although you may not be able to move them the other direction with some of the options you can use on the mac or windows workstation versions. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: Ah I figured someone would ask that. I use pretty much all major adobe products, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, just about the entire suite. I have two home workstation machines. One is Centos, and one is Windows (the one I use Adobe on). I'd prefer if possible to have the same type of RAID cards on both machines, because easier to manage and if I ever decide to sell or give away one machine, I can pull the raid card and use it as a backup. If you are a graphic designer, I'm curious what you use the CentOS box for (or why you use Windows and not Mac :-) Good question when I started out I had windows so that's what I bought - Adobe windows versions. I'm considering migrating to Mac though because Adobe just started a new program where one can migrate to mac versions without paying full price for a new version - they used to charge full price for upgrades if one wanted to switch from Windows to mac. Now they just cancel out the windows version if one migrates to Mac. I noticed you forgot to answer my question, but good to know Adobe has a trade-up program now ;-) From experience I have learned that Photoshop will not install on software raid on my W2K machine - I tried it two years ago, could not get it to install, and after a few days trying to get it to work, called Adobe tech support and at that time the tech support person told me that their products don't run on software raid because they don't want people having multiple copies of one license on a second drive (unless it's for their second copy allowance for a laptop or second machine owned by same person, and only one or the other - the laptop or second desktop are run at the same time - my second copy is on a laptop ). The Photoshop support tech was just shrugging you off here because he didn't want to support you. There exists no such stipulation in Adobe's EULA. As long as it is running on the machine it was licensed for and that machine's OS is supported then you are good. Running on RAID has nothing to do with second copies and second machine allowance as the storage medium is not the key in licensing, the processor(s) are. Adobe needn't even be installed on the local HD if you can get away with a network install and all that registry crap, but it better have a license for the CPU it's running on. Just spoke with Adobe sales today checking into upgrade pricing. The sales guy said that the latest versions of all Adobe products would not install on software RAID systems, BUT he did say, if I bought a hardware raid system, then I would have no problem installing it because the OS and Adobe products do not see hardware raid. It may state in their EULA that there is no restriction running either software or hardware raid, but I have to go by what the sales department tells me. It's rediculous I know. I actually googled a knowledge base article where the problem turns out to be with the serial number generation on Adobe products where it gets confused as to which drive is your primary drive with certain third party software RAID systems. There is some cludgy work-around for it from support, but they recommend avoiding these systems. I had run Adobe Photoshop on Windows 2000 Terminal Server running under software RAID with no problems (besides poor visual performance due to terminal services). That's great wish I could have gotten my apps to install a few years ago - at the time I tried doing it with the Adaptec 2120SA raid card which uses software raid drivers. It's a far cry from the 3ware true raid, yet I don't want to take the chance, set up true software raid, load my adobe products on disk and them find two or three years from now if I upgrade with a new version, that adobe has found a way to disable software raid compatability for all scenairos. Just curious, what version of photoshop were you using under your software raid setup? I tried it with Creative Suite 2 which includes photoshop. At the time, say around 2002-3, I want to say Photoshop CS, yes, but just Photoshop not the whole suite. The RAID was on Windows Server 2000, so it was just the builtin Windows Server software RAID. Maybe there wasn't a problem with that RAID implementation as it was part of the OS. Also I may at some time migrate my adobe products to the Linux machine and run Adobe on WINE on the Linux box. Google just started working with the folks over @ WINE, and they want to make it so all adobe products run flawlessly on Linux - WINE, not just photoshop and illustrator. Today some adobe products run on wine well, some don't, in a few years they all will run well on a linux box using WINE. I'm not sure about running adobe using software raid on a linux box and WINE - never tried it, but going with hareware raid on the linux box eliminates another possible unknown. Don't bother. If you
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. Or use parallels or vmware and run all 3 at once when you want... and let the built in time machine tool do backups to an external firewire or network drive. Yes, even better. I think VMware sells a version of workstation for OS X now too. Yes, and I think it will run VM's created under VMware server on linux or windows, although you may not be able to move them the other direction with some of the options you can use on the mac or windows workstation versions. I just called VMWare and the guy said that for what I wanted to do, a bare metal restore solution, that I would be better served by going with either hardware or software raid maybe combined with something like a tape backup solution, and that their desktop / workstation applications are not suited as a complete backup - bare metal restore solution. He said their system was mainly for taking system snapshots for development purposes. _ Helping your favorite cause is as easy as instant messaging. You IM, we give. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Home/?source=text_hotmail_join___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
If you are a graphic designer, I'm curious what you use the CentOS box for (or why you use Windows and not Mac :-) Good question when I started out I had windows so that's what I bought - Adobe windows versions. I'm considering migrating to Mac though because Adobe just started a new program where one can migrate to mac versions without paying full price for a new version - they used to charge full price for upgrades if one wanted to switch from Windows to mac. Now they just cancel out the windows version if one migrates to Mac. I noticed you forgot to answer my question, but good to know Adobe has a trade-up program now ;-) OH yes did not read it all the way. To answer your question, I also use a Linux server for hosting sites I design for, it was just upgraded to Centos from an old version of RH, and for several reasons I set up the centos box @ home. I wanted to get up to speed quicker on Centos 5 and thought this would help. Plus I feel that it is more secure to use my linux machine at home to both surf the net and upload files to server, more secure for email, etc. I plan on using the Windows machine only for graphic design and not browse with it, use the linux box for surfing. And experiment with some of the Linux graphic design applications to see if they measure up to adobe - maybe some day I could dump adobe all together. _ Need to know the score, the latest news, or you need your Hotmail®-get your fix. http://www.msnmobilefix.com/Default.aspx___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. Or use parallels or vmware and run all 3 at once when you want... and let the built in time machine tool do backups to an external firewire or network drive. Yes, even better. I think VMware sells a version of workstation for OS X now too. Yes, and I think it will run VM's created under VMware server on linux or windows, although you may not be able to move them the other direction with some of the options you can use on the mac or windows workstation versions. I just called VMWare and the guy said that for what I wanted to do, a bare metal restore solution, that I would be better served by going with either hardware or software raid maybe combined with something like a tape backup solution, and that their desktop / workstation applications are not suited as a complete backup - bare metal restore solution. He said their system was mainly for taking system snapshots for development purposes. The bare metal restore most companies tote is not as seamless as they lead to believe and often requires to be run on a Server version of Windows. I would follow Les' advice and use an imager program like clonezilla or Ghost and make a quarterly image and put it to an external HD and have a bootable USB memory stick or live CD with the software on it to restore the image if necessary. Ok for now, just get the cheap 3ware card you were planning as long as it'll be supported in the future. Get an external HD and download one of the free cloning packages live CDs. Clone your hardware mirrored setup to the external HD. Have the OS backup software perform nightly backups to the external HD. Then you have some hardware fault tolerance, and backups, as well as an image of your HD just in case and all for a lot cheaper then when you were talking complete redundancy. If your computer blows up, you can have another computer available, wait you do, your CentOS box... -Ross __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or triple with Windows. Or use parallels or vmware and run all 3 at once when you want... and let the built in time machine tool do backups to an external firewire or network drive. Yes, even better. I think VMware sells a version of workstation for OS X now too. Yes, and I think it will run VM's created under VMware server on linux or windows, although you may not be able to move them the other direction with some of the options you can use on the mac or windows workstation versions. I just called VMWare and the guy said that for what I wanted to do, a bare metal restore solution, that I would be better served by going with either hardware or software raid maybe combined with something like a tape backup solution, and that their desktop / workstation applications are not suited as a complete backup - bare metal restore solution. He said their system was mainly for taking system snapshots for development purposes. I didn't mean to always run under VMware. What you would want to do is get your main application(s) working natively for best performance, then use VMware for whatever else you might need that would otherwise need a separate machine/OS. When you switch to Linux or a Mac, you often have a few Windows programs that you may not use often but you can't duplicate (the netflix online movie viewer, for example...). Running windows under vmware means you don't have to keep a separate box around for these. Then backups of the main system will automatically include these without extra trouble too. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a ?real RAID 1 card on Centos box
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:17:29AM -0400, Therese Trudeau enlightened us: Ah great i'll check out the URL thanks. One thing, an earlier poster reccomended RAID 5 instead of RAID 1. I guess if one only has 2 drives RAID 1 is the way to go but if I have 4 drives he said go with RAID 5 over RAID 1. Isn't RAID 1 mirroring a better solution for a 4 drive array or am I missing something here? You'll get 4 copies of the same data if you do RAID 1 accross 4 drives. Your best bets for 4 drives will be RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 10. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, so you'll have to read up on them and make a decision as to which is best for your use. Matt -- Matt Hyclak Department of Mathematics Department of Social Work Ohio University (740) 593-1263 ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Karanbir Singh wrote: Therese Trudeau wrote: I'm just really looking for a RAID card that will do RAID 1, with four drive capacity, i.e., a master drive with the OS and applications installed and mirrored, and a slave drive for data and photos, graphic design, video, etc also mirrored. What would battery built into a RAID card do for me? the whole point of a BBU is that you can turn on write back caching - and get a fair win in write performance on regular tasks. You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) I've never noticed any data loss from write cache being enabled on a 3ware card that didn't have a BBU. Not to say that BBU is a not a good idea in any case. Of the ~400 3Ware cards I've used(90% of them being 8006-2), only a handful have had a BBU. But all of them were backed either by a basic UPS or a full UPS with generator backup. I haven't run a computer without a UPS since 1996 ? It's second nature these days I don't even remember to recommend them anymore. Of course I may of had data loss, but in the past 8 years it's not been anything that I've personally noticed. I'm not sure if all 3Ware models support BBU or not. For anything real serious like I prefer bigger dedicated storage systems, my array of choice these days comes from 3PAR (entry level pricing ~$90k), really makes my job easy and stress free. nate ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: Ah great i'll check out the URL thanks. One thing, an earlier poster reccomended RAID 5 instead of RAID 1. I guess if one only has 2 drives RAID 1 is the way to go but if I have 4 drives he said go with RAID 5 over RAID 1. Isn't RAID 1 mirroring a better solution for a 4 drive array or am I missing something here? Depends on your needs, RAID 1 is certainly faster. RAID 1+0 faster still, but requires more disk(s/space). Going back to my preferred array vendor, 3PAR, their software/hardware provides the ability to do online RAID conversions to/from RAID 0, 1+0, and 5+0 (3+1 parity to 8+1 parity) with no impact to the server. It also provides the ability to run multiple raid levels on the same physical disks because the RAID is made up of portions of the disks (each disk split into 256MB chunks), rather than the full physical disks themselves. Really flexible/powerful/fast. I love it! On my array I run RAID 1+0 on the outer regions of the disk(~7% faster than the inner regions), and RAID 5+0 (8+1) on the inner regions of the disks. Of course this sort of technology isn't priced for the desktop unless your doing something like desktop consolidation with virtualization or remote application hosting/thin client. nate ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
nate wrote: Therese Trudeau wrote: Ah great i'll check out the URL thanks. One thing, an earlier poster reccomended RAID 5 instead of RAID 1. I guess if one only has 2 drives RAID 1 is the way to go but if I have 4 drives he said go with RAID 5 over RAID 1. Isn't RAID 1 mirroring a better solution for a 4 drive array or am I missing something here? Depends on your needs, RAID 1 is certainly faster. RAID 1+0 faster still, but requires more disk(s/space). Going back to my preferred array vendor, 3PAR, their software/hardware provides the ability to do online RAID conversions to/from RAID 0, 1+0, and 5+0 (3+1 parity to 8+1 parity) with no impact to the server. It also provides the ability to run multiple raid levels on the same physical disks because the RAID is made up of portions of the disks (each disk split into 256MB chunks), rather than the full physical disks themselves. Really flexible/powerful/fast. I love it! On my array I run RAID 1+0 on the outer regions of the disk(~7% faster than the inner regions), and RAID 5+0 (8+1) on the inner regions of the disks. Of course this sort of technology isn't priced for the desktop unless your doing something like desktop consolidation with virtualization or remote application hosting/thin client. I just had to put my .02 in here: The key requirement here is technology for the desktop. Since this is going to be a single user box I really do not recommend mucking around with hardware RAID at all. You have 4 disks, create a software RAID mirror out of disk 1 and 2, and a software mirror out of 3 and 4. Make a VG out of the first mirror, call it CentOS and put the OS and all your applications there, including home. Make a VG out of the second mirror, call it Work and put all your work material there. Then you can always upgrade the OS disks without touching your work disks. You can export your work disks VG, move the disks over to a new machine and work there. Create snapshots of your work disks, backup your work onto your OS disks, etc. A couple of 80 or 160GB disks for the CentOS VG, a couple of 320GB disks for the Work VG and your good to go. If you want any advise on setting up LVM and LVs for different file systems I, and everyone on the list, would be happy to give their opinions. This is the easiest, most flexible and fastest way to get a good performing redundant desktop setup. -Ross __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
nate wrote the whole point of a BBU is that you can turn on write back caching - and get a fair win in write performance on regular tasks. You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) UPS isnt going to help in cases where something breaks on the inner side ( psu fail, mobo fail, ram blows up etc ). But, I am with Ross on this one - if its just a desktop machine, it might be well worth doing a bit of RTFM, and setting up a md-raid/lvm volume and be done with it. -- Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
On 3/10/08, nate [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to help if your PS fails. -- Robert Arkiletian Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada Fl_TeacherTool http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/ C++ GUI tutorial http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/ ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Robert Arkiletian wrote: On 3/10/08, nate [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to help if your PS fails. How about a simple kernel panic! A simple kernel panic will hose your file system with write-back and no BBU. -Ross __ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Robert Arkiletian wrote: On 3/10/08, nate [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to help if your PS fails. That is true, buy high quality stuff up front for fewer problems down the road. Not a sure bet, but a better one. In the half dozen systems I've been running at home for the past several years none of them have suffered a hardware failure of any kind(fortunately). I've been running PC Power and Cooling power supplies for about 9 years now, really high quality PSUs(last one I bought was about 4 years ago, can't speak for their quality now). I've had 15 power supplies fail across about 600 systems in the past 8 years at my various jobs. Probably 150+ disk failures during that same time on the same systems. And maybe 3 RAID card failures(all of which were caught before the system was put into use). In 2005 when I purchased about 200 Cyclades managed power stripes I had at least 10 of those fail, which was scary. Their QA at the time was pretty poor(I toured their facility in early 2006), they claimed I was one of only two customers that were having problems with their power strips(and I had less than 100 of those PDUs in use at the time so ~10% failure rate). They've since been bought by Advocent and they're probably well on their way to outsourcing their manufacturing which they said would improve quality since it would force them to make better specs for testing and stuff. So BBU is certainly a nice thing to have but at least in my experience isn't absolutely critical. Of course for absolutely critical things I don't use server-based RAID anyways. Multiple redundant controllers, multiple redundant paths(to both the disks and to the hosts), is the way to go(assuming your application(s) aren't built to be able to run on something like a distributed file system). I've seen that some of the latest HP servers have dual ported SAS disks, which sounds pretty neat. I assume they still only have one controller though. My main storage array has a built in battery as well, it's pretty cool in that if the power goes out, it keeps the controller operational long enough to dump the contents of the cache(8GB) to an internal IDE disk, then powers off. Eliminates the need for having to maintain the battery during an extended(several day) outage. And of course the cache is mirrored between two controller nodes, and no writes are committed to disk before the write is processed by both nodes. If one node fails the cache is disabled on the remaining node until the other node recovers. nate ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
[CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Hi, I'm considering setting up my Centos Desktop machine for RAID 1. I read a lot of good info at this site:http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#intel-vitesse about differences in fakeraid and real raid cards. The hardware I plan on installing this RAID card into is an Intel DP35DP motherboard with the Intel E4500 dual core processor, and I have two Mator 500 gig SATA hard drives. Can anyone recommend a good “real raid” card for my Linux? What I am looking for is to plug in a RAID controller card out of the box, and without having to load any drivers onto my Centos 5.1 box, have the Real hardware RAID card automatically do all the work, mirror my hard drive onto the second backup drive and do all the work for me. Do such cards exist? If so which model /manufacturers do you recommend? Any experiences/info/insights on hardware RAID cards good or bad on centos boxes would be appreciated. _ Climb to the top of the charts! Play the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_jan___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: Do such cards exist? If so which model /manufacturers do you recommend? Any experiences/info/insights on hardware RAID cards good or bad on centos boxes would be appreciated. 3Ware 8000-series cards are probably the most compatible going back at least 3 years. 9000-series cards are faster/better and CentOS 5.1 should have full support for them. For me, in SATA RAID cards it's 3ware or nothing. Been using them for more than 8 years now. I picked up a extra 8006-2 (2-port RAID) a couple weeks ago for about $120 as a spare for my home system that has a 8006-2. nate ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: So these cards are just plug n play? Just plug them in, no software or drivers required, all mirroring is managed by firmware built into the card RAID card itself? Drivers are required for all storage adapters(RAID or not). 3Ware handles raid in hardware, not in software, it has a bios which you'd typically use to configure the array, you can boot off of the array, etc. 3Ware also offers a management tool for linux (CLI and/or web based) which allows for monitoring, and controlling the adapter's configuration settings. 3Ware has had their linux drivers in the kernel for at least... 8 years now? maybe longer. So any linux distro should have no trouble detecting the card. The latest 9650 cards are pretty new and use a new driver, which may or may not be supported, CentOS 5.1 should work with it fine though(support for CentOS 4 was added almost a year ago, I think with v4.5) They also support hot swap, provided the interface to the disk supports it(typically a hot swap backplane). nate ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Most of the things in this email, from me are a personal opinoin, but I do spend a fair bit of time with these sort of things, these days. Therese Trudeau wrote: 3Ware 8000-series cards are probably the most compatible going back at least 3 years. 9000-series cards are faster/better and CentOS 5.1 should have full support for them. I would'nt bother with a 3ware 8000 or a 3ware 9000 card these days, if you really do want to get 3ware, get atleast a 9650. And anything less than a 9550 should be considered only if you get a really good deal off ebay. And remember that battery backup unit. For me, in SATA RAID cards it's 3ware or nothing. Been using them for more than 8 years now. I used to think the same for a long time, till I started using Areca raid cards. Now, I rate 3ware well behind Areca on performance, reliability and ease of use. If you are doing raid-5 or raid-6 the performance difference is quite noticeable ( I've just recently switched my desktop from a 3ware 9650 to Areca 1220, and got a near 8% improvement in write performance, and 12% on read - raid5 5 spindles ). So these cards are just plug n play? Just plug them in, no software or drivers required, all mirroring is managed by firmware built into the card RAID card itself? Drivers for both 3ware and Areca are included in the CentOS-5.1 kernels. Btw, you might want to keep an eye on some of the not-that-expensive highpoint rocketraid, hey have some fairly decent stuff coming out these days. The issues with them however, the drivers have only recently gone into the mainline upstream kernel - and their userland tools are not quite there yet. But if you need something for 2 to 5 drivers, they are an option worth considering ( they do have drivers for centos-4 and centos-5 on their website ). -- Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
So these cards are just plug n play? Just plug them in, no software or drivers required, all mirroring is managed by firmware built into the card RAID card itself? Drivers are required for all storage adapters(RAID or not). 3Ware handles raid in hardware, not in software, it has a bios which you'd typically use to configure the array, you can boot off of the array, etc. 3Ware also offers a management tool for linux (CLI and/or web based) which allows for monitoring, and controlling the adapter's configuration settings. 3Ware has had their linux drivers in the kernel for at least... 8 years now? maybe longer. So any linux distro should have no trouble detecting the card. The latest 9650 cards are pretty new and use a new driver, which may or may not be supported, CentOS 5.1 should work with it fine though(support for CentOS 4 was added almost a year ago, I think with v4.5) They also support hot swap, provided the interface to the disk supports it(typically a hot swap backplane). Great thanks for that info Nate, I just checked out their web site, looks like the 9500S-4LP would suit my needs for a desktop machine. I've been leary about desktop RAID cards because a few years ago, I bought an adaptec 1210SA RAID card which supposedly does RAID 1 I never could get the darn thing to work in my old windows machine and years later found out it is really a fake raid card. It's been collecting dust ever since may as well throw it out. The drivers it required never worked with W2K. But the Centos server I use has adaptec SCSI RAID controller in it, I guess on the high end for SCSI RAID, adaptec is known for good raid cards, but the one I bought sure did nothing for me for my desktop. _ Need to know the score, the latest news, or you need your Hotmail®-get your fix. http://www.msnmobilefix.com/Default.aspx___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: I'm just really looking for a RAID card that will do RAID 1, with four drive capacity, i.e., a master drive with the OS and applications installed and mirrored, and a slave drive for data and photos, graphic design, video, etc also mirrored. What would battery built into a RAID card do for me? the whole point of a BBU is that you can turn on write back caching - and get a fair win in write performance on regular tasks. Also, make sure whatever raid hardware you decide to invest in supports multiple raid sets ( thats what you seem to want - and not all raid cards do that ) - both 3ware and Areca do support this. Are you considering using this as a backup system and not doing any off machine backups ? if so, consider the possibility of actually loosing the raid card itself : Ideally you want the raid metadata sitting on the disks rather than the raid card, so you can replace the card and be back in action. Again, not all cards support this out of the box. For me, in SATA RAID cards it's 3ware or nothing. Been using them for more than 8 years now. I used to think the same for a long time, till I started using Areca raid cards. Now, I rate 3ware well behind Areca on performance, reliability and ease of use. If you are doing raid-5 or raid-6 the performance difference is quite noticeable ( I've just recently switched my desktop from a 3ware 9650 to Areca 1220, and got a near 8% improvement in write performance, and 12% on read - raid5 5 spindles ). So you reccomend Areca, good thanks I'll check them out too. How are they for RAID 1? To be honest, its been a very long time since I used a raid-1 setup, and I am not sure if I'd bother with it now. If you have 4 drives, might as well raid-5 them. You still get the ability to loose 1 drive at a time, and have a hot-spare : while ending up with the same storage capacity. btw, if you have 4 drives, make sure they are as similar in specifications as possible - however, try and get different batch numbers / production runs. Drives that were made in the same batch, have been stored and stock under the exact same conditions, shipped out together, used and put into production together - have a very very high probability of also failing together :D -- Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
I'm considering setting up my Centos Desktop machine for RAID 1. I read a lot of good info at this site:http://linuxmafia.com/faq/ Hardware/sata.html#intel-vitesse about differences in fakeraid and real raid cards. Discontinued chipset but works fine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816110002 Nice price! $35/ 5 SATA drive support. Fewer drives is a $21 card. No drivers, you run the RAID from BIOS, it shows as an IDE volume for linux. See the NewEgg comments for some tips. Depending on the speed you need, it could be just great. You need Windows to update the firmware. Supports a handful of RAID types, but not RAID 5. True hardware RAID though. All the firmwares, manuals, utils are at: http://www.soft-port.dk/ Hey thanks much I'll check it out! One question on this card - does it write the raid metadata onto the disks rather than store them on the card itself? I ask because Karanbir (in this thread) reccomends to get that kind. If it does, maybe I'll buy two or three of these in case one card fails (since they are out of business). _ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: the whole point of a BBU is that you can turn on write back caching - and get a fair win in write performance on regular tasks. Pardon my ignorance, what is write back caching and BBU? Write Back Caching means the card will cache writes in its onboard storage, and let the OS continue immediately... ...this is only 'safe' if the card has a 'battery backup unit' to protect the cache during power failures so that the cached write data can be written to the disks when the power resumes.Some raid cards even allow you to remove the battery still attached to the cache along with the disks and install them on a different but similar machine in case of a total server failure, this is a feature on many HP SmartArray cards. A battery backed Write Back Cache can hugely speed up random writes such as from a relational database server. Again pardon my ignorance, what is a hot spare? A blank drive connected in the RAID 5 setup that can be written to in case one of the other 3 drives fail? exactly. a hot spare sits unused until one of the RAID members fails, then its used to replace the failed drive by remirroring or restriping the parity, once this is finished, and the original failed drive is replaced it can become the new hot spare. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID 1 card on Centos box
Therese Trudeau wrote: Ah that makes total sense now, thanks. Do the 3wire and the Areca cards allow you to remove battery/cache/disk and install into similar motherboard? Also when you say remove battery and cache, do you mean remove the entire RAID card with battery attached to it as complete assembly with accompaying drive and slap them all onto a new motherboard? I /think/ with the 3ware you remove and swap the whole card, along with the drives. On many server grade systems, such as the the HP DL380 series, with on board SmartArray, the cache ram module and battery are separate detachable components. in the dl380 they are actually two pieces with a cord between them. you unclip and remove the battery from the chassis without messing with the wire, then you pull the cache module out of its special slot, these can then be installed in another HP smartarray, along with the drives from the original system, and when that new DL380 powers up, the raid controller will verify the drives, and flush its cache, insureing data integrity, then boot up your environment. Again pardon my ignorance, what is a hot spare? A blank drive connected in the RAID 5 setup that can be written to in case one of the other 3 drives fail? exactly. a hot spare sits unused until one of the RAID members fails, then its used to replace the failed drive by remirroring or restriping the parity, once this is finished, and the original failed drive is replaced it can become the new hot spare. So if I understand correctly, RAID 5 is three active drives and one blank drive connected to a RAID 5 card, and if one of the three active drives fails, the fourth empty drive is automatically written to? If correct, what happens if the drive that fails loses all it's data before the blank drive has a chance to grab it? with a 3 drive raid 5, you write two drives worth of data across the 3... every third 'block' is a 'parity block' calculated by bit-wise exclusive or (XOR) of the other two blocks.on a 3 drive RAID-5, this parity block alternates across all three drives drive: 012 === data01 0x1 blocks 2x3 23 4 4x5 5 67 6x7 8x9 89 . each of those 'blocks' is like 32K bytes, 64 x 512 byte sectors (this is the stride of the raid, configured when you create the raid). the ones that are just numbers are your data blocks, while the 0x1 is (block_0 XOR block_1) eg, the parity block for that stripe. if any one drive, /dies/ abruptly with no warning, you can still read all the data from the remaining drives, the missing drive is the XOR of the other drives, so the controller can reconstruct it on the fly and you will continue operating in a degraded performance mode. if you have a spare drive, or when you replace the failed drive, the raid controller begins a rebuild where it reads ALL the blocks of the working drives, XOR's them together, and writes this to the spare/new drive. when its done, things revert to normal full performance and redundant operation. raid controllers can do this while the logical volume is still in use and online, many let you set the priority of this to lower the performance impact from raid rebuilds you can extend this with a reasonable number of drives, for instance, 5 drives might look like... drive: 01234 = data0123P blocks P4567 8P9 10 11 where the P's are XOR's of /all/ the other blocks on the same line. p0 = b0 X b1 X b2 X b3. p1 = b4 X b5 X b6 X b7, etc. there's tons of material online explaining this stuff far better than a centos list can. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
