Disk upgrade

Yesterday evening I finished the big disk upgrade. As evidenced by my last post, I have been suffering through the death of some of IBMs old “Pixie Dust” disks. Both of them finally died and forced me into an earlier than planned disk upgrade. But this time I wanted to make sure that future upgrades would be easier. LVM and the Linux software raid tools have improved since my last big disk upgrade but were still horribly complicated. I dream of storage that provides raid 5 reliability, easy expandability (add a disk and the storage grows), and simple management. I guess I will have to wait for ZFS to make it’s way to Linux from Solaris. Apparently there are still some outstanding license restrictions that are holding this up and the port is being done through the FUSE layer.

Difficulties and rants aside, bunker is now up and running with 4 x 400GB disks sliced into 3 partitions (boot, main, testing). Boot is a simple partition at the start of each disk running in raid 1 (2 active, 2 spare), main is raid 5 with LVM on top and testing is a simple 5 GB at the end of each disk for, well, testing raid configurations like growing.

The LVM raid slice (1.1TB) is then setup with some operating partitions on top. The real difficulty came in setting up a initrd that would booth the LVM logical volume correctly. Part of this was that I was using an existing raid array and this confused the mkinirramfs program.

It’s done now and I can get on with my life knowing that I have reliable storage for mythtv recordings, mail and music.