um....compaq dl320s for 1 wont do it. Look at some bioses, i would be pleased if you could point me at some machines that can, ive not found one yet. Maybe you should actually try it? have you? so far Ive not found a box that can boot off a different hd reliably if at all, Ive spent time on this as ide disks are obviosly cheaper than scsi, my conclusion was dont do it.
Have you tested this on the Dell? sounds scsi, might be possible if the second device which was sdb now becomes sda, my original comments were aimaed at ide. Of the two machines with bioses that allowed alternative devices it would not boot. It would take alterations to grub or lilo, from a maintenance point of view its a non-starter. re, setting up lilo, this means on your 2 disks there is a seperate mbr setup etc...never seen a doc on this, if we are talking doing it each time we update the kernel its beginning to get messy and time consuming, its certainly not standard as far as I am aware. A hardware raid card is a way more reliable solution as its simpler. As for testing the /var issue you suggest, I would need to come up with a test that covers all eventualities, rather difficult to guarantee, way better to assume the worst and plan accordingly. regards Steven -----Original Message----- From: Russell Coker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, 4 April 2003 11:12 To: Jones, Steven Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Partitioning a Web Server On Fri, 4 Apr 2003 07:00, Jones, Steven wrote: > You cant normally boot off software raid if the primary disk fails on > Intel. Sure you can. Modern BIOSs have options for booting from a secondary disk. If you setup LILO correctly then the most you should have to do is reconfigure the BIOS to use a different disk. Also if you have hot-swap hardware (say an entry level Dell 1650 PowerEdge server) then you can just unplug the failed disk and it'll boot from the remaining disk. One advantage of software RAID is the control you get over it. With hardware RAID you are often left wondering what the REAL status of your RAID device is, sometimes the communications between the RAID hardware and the OS fails and the OS thinks that it's all fine while it's really not (or the other way around). I've seen both on Solaris. > Its quite possible to fill /var and lock a server up to the point access is > not possible. Now I have to admit I have only seen this on Solaris, I Solaris is buggy then. Not a problem for Linux users. > assume its just as possible on Linux. Don't assume, do a test. Bad assumptions are the cause of much lost time, money, and data. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
