I would like to thank everyone for helping me solve my RAID problems.
With the kernel patch everything seems to work ok now. I see great
increases in speed over the raid-0.50 I was running before. I was
attempting to use a single disk as a raid because I was testing it before
i put it on a production machine. I had no intentions of running raid on
a single disk. However, the purpose was well served because I learned
what to do before I upgraded my existing file servers. If I had not done
that, I would have broken my existing file server infrastructure
temporarily with the upgrades. And downtime sucks.
--Drew
On Thu, 20 May 1999, Piete Brooks wrote:
> [ I've delayed reply to this one to try to work out how to express myself
> better, but have failed, so sorry -- it's not as clear as I'd hoped
> ]
>
> >> o Learning
> >> Granted, no speed improvements, but you can learn about it.
> >> Knowledge like that comes in handy in Interviews ;-)
> > But you are learning in an environment not conducive to learning
>
> I disagree.
>
> > -> ie: the system is not real-world, and in fact, may be far from a good
> > example of the real world.
>
> It's a learning curve.
>
> Such testing gets you a long way up that curve !!
>
> 1) have I correctly set all the kernel build options
> 2) do the startup scripts (etc) correctly start/stop the RAID
> 3) can I create syntactically correct raidtab files
> 4) can I invoke mkraid correctly
> 5) what are the procedures for fixing problems when a disk has failed
> 6) how can I add spare disks
> 7) how so I convert a raw disk to RAID1
> 8) What do I do when I just see "mkrai aborted"
>
> If all users had performed all the above tests on such dummy systems,
> I suspect 90% of the please for help on this list would go !
>
> > Again, testing in a environment not simulating real world.
>
> Again, I diagree !
>
> It *IS* using the same kernel, same scripts, same utilities, same procesures,
> etc, etc
>
> > I can get a chair, and an old record (steering wheel) and pretend
> > that I am driving a car.
>
> No -- a closer analogy is to get into a *REAL* car, and drive it round a
> deserted carparkl / runway / ...
>
> You learn how to start the engine, control the clutch, stop the car,
> control a skid, etc.
>
> Sure, you don't learn how to deal with other traffic, but you get used to
> driving a *REAL* car without the chance of doing damage to anyone else !
>
> [[ I learnt to drive a car aged 10.
> I made one mistake, and knocked down our garden wall.
> I also learnt how to build a dry stone wall :-))
> ]]
>
> > Sure, I can learn and 'test' things,
>
> ... in a real car -- yup !
>
> > but do they in any way represent a real world scenario?
>
> It's a pretty close approximation of the basics.
> Lets get people a good half way up the learning curve before letting them loose
> on real data !!
>
