Root Drive Mirroring and LVM.

[Atro Tossavainen]

Donald,

> Does anyone have any experance or info on whether the raid and lvm
> packages have been ported to YDL? I'd like to set up a raid 1 mirror of my
> root drive to allow for a alternate boot should one drive fail. Then also
> provide for raid 1 mirros of some user data while using Logical Volume
> manager to carve up  a large section of disk. Can anyone comment if this
> is possible with YDL?

It is definitely possible with YDL.  We have an Xserve with YDL 2.3
and two drives on which the / and /boot partitions are mirrored and a
scratch partition is striped with Linux software RAID, and furthermore,
the scratch partition is split into smaller pieces using LVM.

I compiled my own kernel from benh sources and installed the LVM package
from sources on sistina.com.  I do not know if there are ready-made
rpm/yum/... packages for this purpose.

The one really big gotcha is that the Macintosh partitioning scheme
can't tell the Linux kernel that certain partitions are to be considered
"Linux RAID autodetect" (as in x86 using the DOS partition table type
0xfd). This means that you can't boot a Mac Linux system directly from
RAID because the kernel won't be able to autostart the RAID devices.
You have to work around this by creating an initial RAM disk that uses
the raidstart command to start your metadevices, then swaps the initrd
out of the way and proceeds to start the real system.

-- 
Atro Tossavainen (Mr.)               / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish &     / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939  UNIX Dinosaur     / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
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