RAID | LVM and an Apple ANS

[Michael Tucker]

Hi Alex,

  This may not be correct any longer, but when I was poking around about a
year ago, I found that there was no support in Linux for the Apple RAID
card that ships with (or can be added to) the ANS. It's possible that this
is no longer the case, though I doubt much as changed on this front.

Best of luck,
Mike

On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Alexander Holst wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> First of all, sorry for the cross post, but I thought I'd get as many
> ideas | solutions as possible, before I attempt to do anything.
>
> My idea: I would like to use an Apple ANS as a small webserver for our
> university here. It will not see a lot of traffic, therefore the
> hardware should handle it [ANS 700/200 with 2x Seagate 4GB OEM and 2x
> IBM 4GB OEM, builtin dual wide SCSI controller] - we are on a thight
> budget here and the machine is sitting in the corner right now.
>
> Here my questions:
>
> 1]
> I'd like to use a 100Mbs NIC, which NICs work right out of the box with
> YDL?
>
> I've had bad experiances with Tulip based Asant=E9 NICs - they are
> detected by YDL, even configurable with IP# and everything else, but no
> packets ever traverse to the LAN! The log reads something about an old
> style ROM, using alternate media info or such. Funny enough, I can ping
> the NIC, but nothing outside the box!
>
> 2]
> The machine has no tape, but I'd like to have some redundancy. Therefore
> I thought about using all 4 drives in a RAID level 5  or RAID 0/1 setup.
> I read the Root RAID HowTo as well as the RAID HowTo, as well as the LVM
> HowTo from the LDP site. My wishes are: booting from RAID if possible!
>
> a] RAID 0/1
> Using two disks on two channels, striped [would result in ~ 8GB drive
> space] and that mirrored to an identical setting.
>
> or
>
> b] RAID 5
> Using all 4 drives in a level 5 setup, 2 drives per channel [would
> result in ~ 12 GB drive space].
>
> I am actually favouring version b]. Would I loose a lot of performance
> in comparison to a]?
>
> 3]
> Now the tricky part, booting from that RAID, be it 2a] or 2b] - how
> would I accomplish an install?
>
> a]
> Using an extra disk and install a minimal system, setup my RAID volumes,
> then copy the minimal system to the RAID and continue installation
>
> or
>
> b]
> Is it possible to do an install directly onto a RAID volume
>
> 4]
> Would LVM be of any help, like setting up a RAID 5, then use LVM to
> populate it with logical volumes, so I can have a separate /var & /tmp
> partitions to avoid growing logfiles taking up too much space, leaving
> the machine useless? Or is a single partition installation safe these
> days? I understand, that due to booting issues on the ANS, /boot has to
> be a separate partition on the ANS series. How could one establish
> redundancy for that?
>
> Any ideas / procedures appreciated.
>
> Regards,
> Alex
>
>
>
> Alexander Holst
> Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences
> <holst@fh-pforzheim.de>
> ph: +49 [0]7231 28-6837
> fx: +49 [0]7231 28-6040
>
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