[NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID NAS Box

[Jerome Haltom]

On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 20:30 -0500, Daniel Hauck wrote:
> Okay, a little background:
> 
> I've got this old box from the office... a server with a failed drive 
> that is way out of warranty and will not be used by the business for 
> anything.  So what do I do with this?  New toy!
> 
> This box is an iomega NAS box.  It came with Windows 2000 installed and 
> 4 123GB drives where a small amount of each partition was set up for the 
> OS and the rest of the HD space was configured as a software RAID5. 
> Fairly simple.  The hardware is a relatively simple system board with 
> on-board video, 512MB RAM, floppy controller, two IDE ports and all 
> that.  The system board also has a HighPoint IDE RAID controller which 
> is really just another software RAID which means two more IDE 
> controllers with the expectation that software RAID drivers will be used 
> on them... so yeah, 4 IDE ports.  This device also has some strange 
> little device to interface the IDE ports to these removable drive trays. 
>   (Interestingly, it interferes with trying to attach IDE devices 
> addressed as "slave" somehow...)  Finally, there's two 10/100 ethernet 
> ports and a PCI slot with a riser and an Adaptec SCSI RAID card. (not in 
> use)
> 
> So I want to do this under Linux (of course) and I bought 4 400GB drives 
> from outpost.com.  (They're pretty cheap... )  I'm going to install 
> CentOS on the box with the intent of using it as a means of serving up 
> FTP, SMB and NFS services.  I'm giving some thought to how I might set 
> up the partitioning and all that.  Initially, I'm just thinking of 
> mimicking the previous scheme when it was running under Win2K.  In this 
> case, each drive will have the same partition scheme:
> 
> 100MB /boot,
> 2GB {swap},
> 4000MB /
> *everything else* /data


> The non-swap partitions should be RAID where /data would be a RAID5 and 
> the other two RAID1.  CentOS didn't issue any complaints when I wanted 
> to set everything up as RAID and then set the actual /boot, / and /data 
> partitions up in the Linux software RAID.  I think the installation 
> failed while files were copying because of a bad install DVD... (I'll 
> check it in a bit and burn another one if needed)

My suggestion is to format each disk into two equal sized partitions.
Use MD to RAID1 the first partition of all of the disks. Use MD to RAID5
the other 4 partitions together. Put LVM on the RAID5 partition and
export / and /data to your hearts content.

Boot off of the first partition of the disk.

> 
> Okay, so I'm soliciting comments and better ideas..?

I have no idea how to install any of the RPM based distros on this
configuration. Debian/Ubuntu make it pretty simple, their installers can
set up the RAID and LVM. I'd hope RHEL's can do the same.

If that fails, ditch the installer and just untar a working install onto
it after configuring it (from a LiveCD).

> 
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