On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Leslie Rhorer [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

       It's certainly workable.  You might consider something other than
RAID1 for your swap partition.

Looks reasonable. Some comments:

1) I didn't bother using RAID on my /boot. I just installed grub on
each of the 3 drives but only boot from the first one. If that
partition goes bad I can boot from the second or third drive any time
by just telling BIOS to use a different drive. This saves me from
dealing with any mkinitrd stuff. I've never had a boot partition go
bad because of the drive itself in 14 years running Linux. They go bad
because I write the wrong stuff there. RAID doesn't solve that
problem. This method does require that I update the two backups by
hand once in awhile. That's OK by me.

       Define, "once in awhile [sic]".

Every 2-3 months I make sure each drive is up to date.

It's certainly possible to do it,
but the very reason I went with boot arrays rather than boot partitions was
it was getting to be a pain to update the backup drives all the time.

All the time vs once every 2-3 months.

Even an out-of-date boot drive will allow me to boot the machine and
get things fixed.

Almost every time a package is added or deleted, /etc gets updated.  Keeping
different copies of the configuration files in /etc in the initrd and the
root partition is not the best of ideas, although if course it can be done.

As I said I don't using an initrd. I've never learned how to build one
and didn't need it if I didn't use RAID on /boot.

I don't understand your comments about /etc as it's not kept in /boot.
/etc, /, /home, and all other directories are on RAID. Only /boot
isn't, so it needs only a kernel and grub.

Any package which must be available at boot *MUST* update initrd, and if
most distro packages are anything, it is update rich.

quoted

2) I don't use RAID for swap. I let the kernel do that internally. I
almost never swap out on my home server so trying to protect that with
RAID for the few moments I might use it seems like overkill to me.

       I halfway agree.  My servers almost never use any significant amount
of swap, and even my workstations only use it very occasionally.  There have
been instances, however, where the swap has grown to be quite large.  With
that in mind, and given the very small amount he has allocated for swap, one
might suggest a RAID0 array of the areas to be used for swap, or maybe an
LVM volume.

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html