[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 09:34:20AM -0700, Devin L. Ganger wrote:
> At Friday, May 05, 2006 4:59 AM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>
>> Devin L. Ganger wrote:
>
>>> Whereas every time I've tired to get Linux RAID to work, I've ended
>>> up with dead filesystems every time. Every distro I've tried, every
>>> architecture I've run on, every kernel variant. I finally gave up. I
>>> can live with software RAID under Solaris and even Windows, but IME
>>> Linux RAID kills filesystems dead.
>>>
>>> I'm also none too enamored with ext3fs. XFS, on the other hand,
>>> rocks on toast.
>
>> I haven't tried JFS or XFS yet, but have had reasonable luck with
>> ext3, and I've been using Linux software RAID to mirror my boot disks
>> on this machine for years without a glitch.
>
> Simple mirroring at the disk level seems to work fine; it's when you get
> into creating RAID-5 volumes that everything starts to come off the
> wheels. It really wants to have whole disks dedicated for whatever
> you're doing; while you can configure RAID volumes against partitions,
> you're asking for trouble if you do.
>
> I'd just come off of a gig involving a lot of VxVM work, so I didn't see
> anything weird about RAIDing partitions instead of whole disks.
> Apparently all the online Linux folks I talked to thought that was
> really strange. I even had one guy tell me that I was doing it
> completely wrong (even though nothing in the docs suggested otherwise).

I always thought the Linux RAID stuff was a little weird, but always
found it very functional, up to and including RAID5.  I even once, just
for the pure stupidity of it, did a one-disk raid 5 across 4 partitions.
Harder to test failures, but it worked.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org