[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Devin L. Ganger]

At Friday, May 05, 2006 10:05 PM, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

<snip my tales of woe with Linux RAID>

> That's some bizarre tales.

Yup.

> I do this all the time without trouble.
>
> Companies sell it packaged as RAID systems all the time.

I know -- that was the most frustrating part of it. As far as I could
tell I wasn't doing anything outside of the norm.

> My own RAIDs are always on partitions, never whole drives, because I
> frequently reserve space for swap or boot partitions.

Question -- do you use multiple partitions from the same physical drive
for different RAID volumes? That's the only oddball element in the
configurations I was using, and even then, I was only doing that with
drives/volumes that were low-I/O, and only with simple mirrors where I
needed to be able to survive the loss of a drive, but needed to split
the available space up.

>> This is also when I developed my hatred of ext3fs. With XFS I was
>> able
>> to eventually recover my data. With ext3fs, it was just gone. It's
>> been several years now, though, so things have probably stabilized.

> Several years ago ext3 was marked experimental and you were not
> supposed to use it. It was in active development for quite some time.

This was after the experimental tag was gone, but maybe just after.

> I would never say the software is perfect, but your case is a
> stastical anomaly.

Granted, but it's also my experience; until I have reason to mess with
again and prove to myself that it works, I'm now wary of it. I now lean
towards keeping the complicated disk configurations out of software
entirely and using hardware arrays or SANs (when the expense is
justified) to do that for me. The money spent up front is usally more
than compensated by the time I don't have to muck with it and by being
able to hot-swap problem drives and have things just rebuild.

--
Devin L. Ganger <devin at thecabal.org>
Homepage: http://www.thecabal.org/~devin/
Devin on Earth: http://blogs.thecabal.org/blogs/devin/