Hi, for the past week I've been fighting to get a RAID5 System running under SuSE 6.3 linux. I have finally met success and want to share my Odysee with you and future foolhardy people. First thing: The Raidtools 0.90 HOWTO oversimplifies certain aspects. The one-liner on unpacking and installing the tools and the path are an understatement! I like the way it's done and all, I think a few lines should be added concerning the patch and stuff. I've seen several questions in the mailing list which can be traced to the fact, that they do not have the right patch installed. I'm not a pro at linux things as I've first become aquainted with linux about a year ago and have enough other things going on. Should I mistake in any sense feel free to write me, I take no warranty for anything stated here. ---- SuSE 6.3 has the old mdtools patch installed and on top of that it uses Kernel 2.2.13 with an LVM patch which doesn't make life much easier. To get good results do following: get the most recent patch for raidtools 0.90. For SuSE linux with the kernel 2.2.13 it is raid014519990824.gz (I'm not sure that's quite right, I'm citing from memory). make sure the SuSE kernel sources (not the originals! we want all the other fun patches ;-) and the raidtools 0.90 are installed. they can both be found on the CD's from SuSE. the next step is to apply the patch to the kernel, even though there seems to already be raid support installed. you will receive some warnings, go ahead and ingnore them. aside from that you should have three rejects. One in the asm-ppc directory, which I didn't bother about researching, one in arch/i386/defconfig and one in drivers/block/ll_rw_blk.c The next step is to correct the ll_rw_blk.c file. obviously the LVM patch somehow conflicts with the RAID patch, so don't do anything if you're using a LVM! One has to apply the ll_rw_blk.c patch by hand. find the corresponding *.rej file, then go finding the #ifdef CONFIG_BLK_DEV_MD and patch the sections to fit to the patch. take care, make backups, etc. patch the arch/i386/defconfig by hand (I'm not sure how nessecary that is, but I did it anyways) and then compile the whole thing. one should have a working kernel which can then made a further boot in lilo. boot it and if you did everything right one should find a file called /proc/mdstat, giving a list of personalities listed. Don't be confused, that the old mdstat showed free devices and the new one doesn't, it's working anyways. (that took me a while, sending me off on a wild goose-hunt) now one can proceed as in the HOWTO and do all the mkraid stuff, it should work fine. By the way don't forget to do a raidstop before shutting down. My system would tell me that my /dev/hda1 has changed to /dev/hdb1 or something if one doesn't call raidstop. Let me add following. I have a working knowledge of C, not of linux kernels, so what I did was half guessing. If the raid gurus can explain why or maybe a better way, I would gladly like to see it. Hope this helps, Eduard Ralph -- Sent through Global Message Exchange - http://www.gmx.net
