Software raid 5?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Software raid 5?
started by: Tomo

Posted by Tomo on Mar. 13 2006,11:45

I've been using DSL for sever things over the last year or so, im out of touch a little becuase dsl is so stable i havent needed to upgrade since i installed it.

Now i find my needs growing....... i need something like that can do some software Raid 5 kinda like freenas but with extra bits.

I need samba as i use with now with dsl.... i need apache, php, ftp and webmin.

I have 10x 20Gb drives that i want to software raid 5 together.

Is there any apps for DSL that will fit my needs for the Raid 5?

thanks

-Tomo

Posted by nigelrmtaylor on Mar. 13 2006,12:38

Hi

I think I'm going through a similar process to you at the moment.

I've just setup a raid1 (syncing at the moment).

In outline this is what I did:
1) did a hard disk install onto one of the disks
2) created a big partition on both disks for the raid using cfdisk - I set the type to bf FD just for good measure
3) copied the mkraid and raidstart executables from a knoppix installation and put them into /opt on the hard disk along with a raidtab file that defined the raid
4) ran mkraid to create the raid
5) updated the bootlocal.sh script to run raidstart at boot time

let me know if you need more info

So far So good -

Cheers

Nigel

Posted by Tomo on Mar. 13 2006,16:03

I will give that a try thanks ........

i want to use 8x 20gb drives and 2x spare drives.

Reading that these raid tools can do it should be perfect

thanks

Posted by DaveJ45 on June 17 2006,21:05

Can you explain exactly how/where to get the mkraid, raidstart, and raidtab files?
and show the contents of your raidtab file.

I seem to have a problem with my bare HD instal of DSL, although I can access the four 23Gb SCSI drives through the terminal window, using cfdisk and mke2fs, I can't seem to get them to come up in the mount utility. What's even stranger is that I can mount the SCSI drives when running DSL live from the CD, but not from a HD install. Anyway, I want to use DSL to act as a server with the 4 SCSI drives in a RAID 5 configuration. I have a 6.4Gb IDE HD to use for the actual install of DSL.

Tried FreeNAS, but it croaks during initial bootup, with no indication why. Tried SMEServer, which is way too complicated for my needs. NasLite+ doesn't support SCSI or RAID, so I am hoping to solve the problem with the right add ons to DSL. I just need to be able to map the drives on the server to some windows based workstations.

Any help would be mucho appreciated.

DaveJ45