Re: RAID1 netinst CD
I was trying the Net-Install.iso posted earlier with similar problems. The install started fine. I was able to partition my drives: 2 x 1.2Gb IDE Partioned Part 1 /boot 64Mb Part 2 / 1100Mb Part 3 Swap 150Mb All set to type fd. I did have some trouble creating the Raid (espically after many attempts at installing), so I switched to the console and stop any existing md drives and recreated using mdadm. Everything installed fine after that. But I could not get grub to setup on (hd0) or (md0). The only way I have been able to get this to work, is set my Part 1 to type 82 on both drives, mount the part 1 on drive 1 to /boot and set the other to /boot/bkup. Grub would then install, and I can now boot. My thought was to copy the contents of boot to the bkup folder and emergency boot from a floppy to get the boot loader installed on the second drive. Haven't tried yet though. I want to web/email server with the drives software Raided (mirror). I will be using 2 x 9Gb SCSI drives for this, but should I look at a 500Mb or 1.2Gb IDE drive to hold /boot and swap? Thanks Joe
Re: RAID1 netinst CD
On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 11:59:58PM +, W. Borgert wrote: On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 08:44:56PM +0100, Erich Waelde wrote: many bytes do I have to zero out? http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/debian-user-200402/msg05104.html and references therein. OK, so d-i should at one point either change /etc/mkinitrd/ files or at least tell the user to do so manually. At the moment d-i just tries to install the kernel at that fails. I guess it has to do something with the way the root partition is detected. after the system is installed, mkinitrd has no problem detecting that the root partition is on a md-device When running root on an md I only have 2 problems. I neeed to put in a delay , lets say 2-5 secs, or else one of the partitions is reported as beeing in use when the raid is set up. The other problem is that grub is unable to probe, and fails. The workaround is to not let grub probe, but insted using symlinks. This is mainly tested on woody, with packages from skolelinux (slightly modified, grub is 0.93+cvs20030217-0.skolelinux.1, and initrd-tools is 0.1.48.skolelinux.1) As a possible workaround: install a small / partition elsewhere (no raid), conclusion, of whether this works, should work or cannot work. Consider this a timeconsuming experiment. Yes, indeed. That's why one wants RAID done by d-i completely. First of all, to test this I would, as others have pointed out, start with setting up raid manually. If you need help, take a look at a mini-how that i wrote for skolelinux-servers. It's located at http://developer.skolelinux.no/dokumentasjon/skolelinux_softwareraid_howto.txt You asked: will this be in d-i at some point. ... - I think its safe to say, it will not be in beta3. Which is bad. Both RH and SuSE installers can to RAID installs. So my company admin says. Hopefully we'll get it with the final version of d-i. People who cant set up SWRaid without an automagic installer, should not run SWRaid. Because they will not add the extra bits that are needed, like monitoring setup and so one, and therefor SWRaid would only provide false security. But yes, it will be nice to have the possibility to set up SWRaid out of the box. -- Finn-Arne Johansen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bzz.no/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID1 netinst CD
Quoting Finn-Arne Johansen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: (mkinitrd problems when installing kernel with d-i + md) I guess it has to do something with the way the root partition is detected. after the system is installed, mkinitrd has no problem detecting that the root partition is on a md-device Maybe it doesn't work, because the mount point is /target/? First of all, to test this I would, as others have pointed out, start with setting up raid manually. If you need help, take a look at a mini-how that i wrote for skolelinux-servers. It's located at http://developer.skolelinux.no/dokumentasjon/skolelinux_softwareraid_howto.txt With the help of the company admin, I was able to create a SW-RAID manually. I have to enable other people to setup similar boxes, who are not command line heroes. That's why my hope is on d-i. Which is bad. Both RH and SuSE installers can to RAID installs. So my company admin says. Hopefully we'll get it with the final version of d-i. People who cant set up SWRaid without an automagic installer, should not run SWRaid. Because they will not add the extra bits that are needed, like monitoring setup and so one, and therefor SWRaid would only provide false security. I have to disagree here. In a (more or less) big company, you will always find some people who create a policy (install with RAID) and other people, who just have to follow this policy, even if they do not know about the details. For them, it must still be easy to set up the machine. As long as there are at least some experts, this is OK, I think. Even the experts will prefer an easy to use installer, instead of many(!) manual steps you have to do, when creating root-on-md without the help of d-i. But yes, it will be nice to have the possibility to set up SWRaid out of the box. Yes :-) Cheers and many thanks for your hints and the howto document! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID1 netinst CD
Hello, W. Borgert writes: That message was meant for debian-boot, but didn't appear there, so I send it directly to you. Cheers! On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:47:37PM +, W. Borgert wrote: Hello Paul and all, today I tried your iso image, but had not the time to complete the installation - tomorrow I will do this. Three issues until here: 1. I'm a RAID/MD newbie: Is there a howto or manual about what every single step I have to take to realise RAID1 using the installer? If you are new to md/raid, then I would recommend to play with it on an up and running system first. Create 2 partitions same size on different disks, a few 100 MB are perfectly sufficient. Then install mdadm and read the docs. Search on debian-user, maybe. briefly: - mark the partitions as 'fd' Linux raid autodetection - create a raid device /dev/md0 with mdadm --create (or /dev/md/0 if you have mounted devfs) - create a filesystem on that device like mkfs.xfs /dev/md0 - mount the new fs monitor progress with cat /proc/mdstat That should get you going. Once you grok that, its much simpler to deal with it, while on limited resources. 2. I'm missing XFS in the file system list. Is it really not there or do I have to enable this somehow? well, it's not yet in the menu, but it seems that the sw parts are available. So try to do it on the shell --- give the configurator something to do, however, otherwise it will believe that it has not successfully created and mounted file systems. 3. It seems that the installer uses Linux 2.4. Any chance to use and install 2.6? not yet integrated. But not a problem to boot the 2.4.24 kernel and then upgrade after base system has been installed properly. Thanks for your work, I really hope it makes it soon into d-i. Cheers, -- W. Borgert [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://people.debian.org/~debacle/ Also see my report on debian-boot http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/debian-boot-200403/msg00652.html Good luck. I copied debian-boot CC. Erich -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID1 netinst CD
Quoting Erich Waelde [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:47:37PM +, W. Borgert wrote: 1. I'm a RAID/MD newbie: Is there a howto or manual about what every single step I have to take to realise RAID1 using the installer? If you are new to md/raid, then I would recommend to play with it on an up and running system first. Create 2 partitions same size on different disks, a few 100 MB are perfectly sufficient. Then install mdadm and read the docs. Search on debian-user, maybe. briefly: - mark the partitions as 'fd' Linux raid autodetection That was clear to me already, because of the error message (two steps later in d-i). I just went back into fdisk and changed it. - create a raid device /dev/md0 with mdadm --create (or /dev/md/0 if you have mounted devfs) Do I need to edit /etc/raidtab.conf or any other file? If so, does d-i help there? - create a filesystem on that device like mkfs.xfs /dev/md0 OK, - mount the new fs monitor progress with cat /proc/mdstat That should get you going. Once you grok that, its much simpler to deal with it, while on limited resources. Yes, thanks for the hint. Anyway, if the md/raid stuff becomes part of d-i, there should be a step-by-step intro in the d-i manual, esp. for people who are new to mdadm and friends. 2. I'm missing XFS in the file system list. Is it really not there or do I have to enable this somehow? well, it's not yet in the menu, but it seems that the sw parts are available. So try to do it on the shell --- give the configurator something to do, however, otherwise it will believe that it has not successfully created and mounted file systems. I will try that, thanks. 3. It seems that the installer uses Linux 2.4. Any chance to use and install 2.6? not yet integrated. But not a problem to boot the 2.4.24 kernel and then upgrade after base system has been installed properly. No, not really a problem, but it would be nice to use 2.6 in d-i, if one is going for 2.6 anyway. If there are problems with 2.6 they show up immediately, which might be better or not. Thanks for your help! One remaining question: Does anybody know whether the md/raid stuff is/will be included into official d-i? Plans? Cheers, WB -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID1 netinst CD
Hello, today I sat down together with an experienced Linux/UNIX admin and we went through the complete installation with RAID1. Unfortunately, we didn't succeed. We have two identical HDs and created four partitions on each in an identical layout. We sat all(!) partitions to type 'FD'. We created the MDs and created three ext3 and one swap (all on top of MD). We would like to have XFS, but it was not in the menu, but that't not a big issue. Problems: 1. We were not able to create all MDs from the menu. At the beginning, the first partition of the first SCSI disk did not appear in the d-i menu. We created all with mdadm. 2. Deleting MDs from d-i didn't work. The MDs always showed up again and again! 3. The installation of the kernel failed completely with sth. like /usr/sbin/mkinitrd: Cannot determine root device. We tried to disable the first MD (not possible from the menu, but mdadm worked), and did / with ext3 and without RAID1, but error (3.) still appeared. What's wrong with my setup? Thanks in advance for any help! Cheers, WB -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID1 netinst CD
Hi, W. Borgert writes: Hello, today I sat down together with an experienced Linux/UNIX admin and we went through the complete installation with RAID1. Unfortunately, we didn't succeed. We have two identical HDs and created four partitions on each in an identical layout. We sat all(!) partitions to type 'FD'. We created the MDs and created three ext3 and one swap (all on top of MD). We would like to have XFS, but it was not in the menu, but that't not a big issue. Problems: 1. We were not able to create all MDs from the menu. At the beginning, the first partition of the first SCSI disk did not appear in the d-i menu. We created all with mdadm. 2. Deleting MDs from d-i didn't work. The MDs always showed up again and again! yapp, confirmed: menu doesn't, shell does (always?) work Another option is to zero out the superblocks, or at least the beginning of a partition with something along the lines of dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdaXX bs=1024 count=64 do not take this command lightly. I did use it intentionally to zero out the complete disks with of=/dev/sda and no count ... it will run until no space left on device. 3. The installation of the kernel failed completely with sth. like /usr/sbin/mkinitrd: Cannot determine root device. well, this is a completely different game. I have not yet gotten through to this point. There was an interesting thread on debian-user lately ... //me searching, here we go: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/debian-user-200402/msg05104.html and references therein. As a possible workaround: install a small / partition elsewhere (no raid), reserve space for the read / partition on raid. Install. Now once that configuration is up, mount the raid /-partition on /new-root, say, copy / over to /new-root (cp -a), chroot /new-root, mount /proc and stuff in there. Now try to install a new kernel and see, how that goes in the chroot-ed environment. I have tried this, but not really come to a conclusion, of whether this works, should work or cannot work. Consider this a timeconsuming experiment. We tried to disable the first MD (not possible from the menu, but mdadm worked), and did / with ext3 and without RAID1, but error (3.) still appeared. What's wrong with my setup? Thanks in advance for any help! Cheers, WB You asked: will this be in d-i at some point. The answer is: if someone creates the neccessary patches. But in more detail: - I think its safe to say, it will not be in beta3. - Keep in mind, that Pauls effort is not yet an official thing. - so IMHO it will be a while. I know that others are out there waiting for exactly this: have raid, lvm, devfs, xfs available immediately after installation. so, if we help it in: yes. Not to forget: Thank you, Paul! and whatever testing I can do to help, I'm willing to switch on my noise machine any other time ... :-) (OT: in case you have doubts about the unbelievable noise of a Seagate Barracuda --- get yourself some :) Cheers, Erich -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
