Reply to: RAID 1 failure

[Sysman]

I found dual booting / VM / Linux as base & WINE a complete pain in the arse and always wasted more time setting up, or in the case of the VM, seldom remembering to turn it on. My advice is get a £2/300 base unit off ebuyer (Extra Value Desktop PC - Desktops | Ebuyer.com - 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive for £230!) and get a KVM Switch. This means you can set the machine up properly, add RAID (fck me this is soooo easy in Ubuntu now) share folders set up scripts to run via cron etc - and just keep the machine on. You can then use a Windows dev environment if you wish, test apps and sites on Windows over the local network. For the sake of £230 and a tiny bit of floor space it is well worth getting a dedicated box if you want to play with Linux.

Sound advice. I have just come to the conclusion that this is what I need to do. Well, that or get another Mac

Have KVM switch. Have external USB drives. Just need one of those el cheapo machines and a Gigabit switch, cos my router only does 100.

Waiting on upgrading the router because of this:

When it comes to IPv6 support, consumer home networking gear lags far behind other devices, like enterprise equipment and PC operating systems. Most devices certified as IPv6-compliant by the IPv6 Forum are full of implementation bugs, experts say.

[Sysman]

And that's another reason for me to pick Linux as a platform.

I knew I'd spoken too soon...

The latest Ubuntu security patch delivered kernel 2.6.35-28 and VMware recompiled bits of itself.

VMware is now broken, and I seem to be seeing a massive slow down in my backups.

Sigh. VMware does fire up, but after logging in to my Win7 instance it ignores any input from the mouse or keyboard.

[Ardesco]

Of course I do. Its backed up. The speed is more important to me, and the odds of a drive failing are quite slim. I think in my life I have had more cars fail than hard drives.

With real RAID 1, you should also get double the speed. You do with Adaptec cards anyway as they read from both drives at the same time. Pretend RAID 1 built into motherboards doesnt seem to does this.

[Sysman]

These days I get the impression that if you know Drupal, Joomla! etc..you're having to refuse work you're so damn busy. Probably time for me to learn one of those.

And that's another reason for me to pick Linux as a platform.

I wouldn't have described Joomla as "chav" myself, but I definitely get an uneasy feeling and my BS shield goes up whenever I hear someone promoting it.

Drupal has the distinct advantage of its PDO layer; it isn't locked in to MySQL, and who knows where Oracle is going with that?

[Sysman]

And that's before you figure out the partitioning! I imagine Linux LVM et al would be totally incompatible with Windows partitioning and NTFS.

Having tried various combinations, you can have LVM and Windows on separate disks.

For a full restore on the Windows side, it really prefers to have disks that either have the same partition table as when the Windows backup was taken, or an empty disk to go at. Windows can certainly be picky at boot time and might throw some kind of signature mismatch.

Although you can happily read and write NTFS from Linux, I'm not sure how that would stand up in a repair or recovery situation (Linux uses FUSE to access NTFS and that represents an extra layer, so is likely to carry a performance penalty). I don't know if FUSE can emulate the full behaviour of NTFS and get it right 100% of the time, but it certainly seems OK for a bit of file copying.

On the other hand, using VMware or VirtualBox on Linux does give you the ability to back up disks for Windows clients plus the Linux file system all in one go.

[administrator]

Yup, huge problems getting good PHP / MySQL people. A real struggle. Drupal and Wordpress are the ones to work out - Joomla is a bit chav if you ask me

[lilelvis2000]

Indeed, but why? With one drive the two co-exist quite happily; the problem is the lack of support from Linux for a common type of hardware.



I didn't know if I wanted to go Linux only as the base, and by virtualising Windows 7 I would have lost out on the Aero interface and performance of games etc. I'd have been better off installing Windows and virtualising Linux, which I have, but still haven't used it much.

But it's fair to say I'd have more job oppurtunities right now if I'd made more of an effort to do some Linux development work.

Exactly the RAID hardware support is Linux is pretty poor, unless you can get a driver from the manufacturer. Though I understand that Server 2008 can do software RAID now.

And that's before you figure out the partitioning! I imagine Linux LVM et al would be totally incompatible with Windows partitioning and NTFS.

As admin states when going RAID you'd have to make a choice Windows or Linux.

These days I get the impression that if you know Drupal, Joomla! etc..you're having to refuse work you're so damn busy. Probably time for me to learn one of those.

[administrator]

I didn't know if I wanted to go Linux only as the base, and by virtualising Windows 7 I would have lost out on the Aero interface and performance of games etc. I'd have been better off installing Windows and virtualising Linux, which I have, but still haven't used it much.

But it's fair to say I'd have more job oppurtunities right now if I'd made more of an effort to do some Linux development work.

If Aero and game performance are an issue then you will never use Linux as your base machine. I use Linux every day but would still not use it as my base machine as I really like Windows for my day-to-day work and also for the games

I found dual booting / VM / Linux as base & WINE a complete pain in the arse and always wasted more time setting up, or in the case of the VM, seldom remembering to turn it on. My advice is get a £2/300 base unit off ebuyer (Extra Value Desktop PC - Desktops | Ebuyer.com - 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive for £230!) and get a KVM Switch. This means you can set the machine up properly, add RAID (fck me this is soooo easy in Ubuntu now) share folders set up scripts to run via cron etc - and just keep the machine on. You can then use a Windows dev environment if you wish, test apps and sites on Windows over the local network. For the sake of £230 and a tiny bit of floor space it is well worth getting a dedicated box if you want to play with Linux.

[VectraMan]

Oh if you are trying to dual boot WIndows an Linux and also share the RAID I'd say you'll be in for a rough ride.

Indeed, but why? With one drive the two co-exist quite happily; the problem is the lack of support from Linux for a common type of hardware.

You'd be better virtualising Windows inside Linux and sharing NFS mounts as drives in the WIndows Instance.

I didn't know if I wanted to go Linux only as the base, and by virtualising Windows 7 I would have lost out on the Aero interface and performance of games etc. I'd have been better off installing Windows and virtualising Linux, which I have, but still haven't used it much.

But it's fair to say I'd have more job oppurtunities right now if I'd made more of an effort to do some Linux development work.

[lilelvis2000]

I was trying to install Ubuntu, but the regular install wouldn't recognise the system, but there's a different more manual install I had to use followed by lots of terrifying command line stuff to install an "experimental" driver for the RAID. That worked, but the intention was to dual boot with Windows and with both on there I absolutely could not get the loader to boot into Linux (Windows 7 worked fine). I even posted on the Ubuntu forums, and got zero replies.

In the end I gave up, and wondered why I was bothering with Linux in the first place.

Oh if you are trying to dual boot WIndows an Linux and also share the RAID I'd say you'll be in for a rough ride. You'd be better virtualising Windows inside Linux and sharing NFS mounts as drives in the WIndows Instance.

I used Linux because I didn't have much cash t fork out for SBS and I wasn't interested in Exchange anyway. So I have a Samba PDC, e-mail server in smarthost mode, LDAP, CUPS, WebDAV and webmail. It took some time but I have had plenty of that on my hands recently.

[Sysman]

Ive always said, its only free if your time is worth nothing.

That's another snag with it - you keep coming across the Free Software zealots.

I really don't mind paying for software that is decent.

[escapeUK]

gets past this but can be tediously complicated - if you want to do something non-standard, you have to
specify everything else as well.

Ive always said, its only free if your time is worth nothing.

[Sysman]

I was trying to install Ubuntu, but the regular install wouldn't recognise the system, but there's a different more manual install I had to use followed by lots of terrifying command line stuff to install an "experimental" driver for the RAID. That worked, but the intention was to dual boot with Windows and with both on there I absolutely could not get the loader to boot into Linux (Windows 7 worked fine). I even posted on the Ubuntu forums, and got zero replies.

Too many of these Linux distros seem to assume that you only have one disk and that if you already have Windows on your system you want to shrink that partition and put Linux alongside. The Ubuntu Alternative Download gets past this but can be tediously complicated - if you want to do something non-standard, you have to specify everything else as well. I got away with a simpler mode which allowed me to specify LVM.

In the end I gave up, and wondered why I was bothering with Linux in the first place.

To round out my CV is one answer. That I prefer command line control over point and click methods for a lot of stuff is another.

[Sysman]

To be fair to SGI I still have an Octane 2, only a small squat box, but weights a ton, made from cast iron almost! Also have an SGI Fuel, PC-quality, noisy in a cheapo-type way, whereas the Octane hums nicely.

Best of all is the IBM Intellistation 285, RS6000, really heavy, arrived on pallet, totally fast though, at least twice as fast as the Sun Ultra 45 I also have.

Geektastic or what!

Somebody has to do it. In hindsight I'm glad I didn't put an offer in for a pair of Vaxes which were palleted up. The decider was that my office at the time was on the fourth floor

[VectraMan]

I've got two currently and am planning on building another. I've got a LVM with six partitions sitting on top of the RAID 5 as well. What went wrong in your case?

I was trying to install Ubuntu, but the regular install wouldn't recognise the system, but there's a different more manual install I had to use followed by lots of terrifying command line stuff to install an "experimental" driver for the RAID. That worked, but the intention was to dual boot with Windows and with both on there I absolutely could not get the loader to boot into Linux (Windows 7 worked fine). I even posted on the Ubuntu forums, and got zero replies.

In the end I gave up, and wondered why I was bothering with Linux in the first place.