[plug] Good RAID Howto

[Shannon Carver]

Hi, 

I'd almost garuntee with an HP NetServer, you'd have a professional
hardware RAID controller.  The way to check for that is when the machine
boots up, the PC will POST, before it boots the operating system, it'll
usually prompt you momentarily for SCSI and or RAID setup panels
(Usually with a key combination to enter them, one of the FX keys, or
Ctrl+H, although can be anything really).

I've got a couple of servers here at work with Compaq Smart Array2
cards.  When you enter the setup for the cards, you get a BIOS like
screen asking you to create/change/remove active array's.  You can setup
your raid array here.

The catch with using the raid controllers, is linux will pick the drives
up as a different device, for instance, our Compaq cards create devices
such as:
/dev/c0dp1-x where c0 is the first array, and p1 is the partition on
that array.

Of course, if the scsi drives are hanging off a plain scsi adapter, you
should see them detected on bootup, or by reading /var/log/dmesg and
looking for: 
Dmesg | grep sd

Which will usually list all scsi devices found at bootup.

Hope this helps

Regards

Shannon

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at plug.org.au [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On
Behalf Of Kai Jones
Sent: Monday, 12 September 2005 10:14 AM
To: PLUG
Subject: [plug] Good RAID Howto

Hi guys and girls,

I know the principle of RAID and how it works but I've never had to 
configure it before.

My current situation is I have an HP Netserver 2000 U3 running Red Hat 
with 2.4.2-2 kernel as a file server, currently using 3 x 36 Gig SCSI's 
on RAID 1.

I have three new 73gig SCSI disks which I want to configure so I can 
copy the data from the existing 36 Gig RAID 1 and move those disks to 
another machine (or use on a different mount point). The SCSI's are hot 
swappable and I'm googing for Linux RAID Howto so I can figure out what 
device (eg /dev/sd##) the drives are available at, then configure the 3 
x 73 Gig drives as RAID 1, sync them, mount them and copy the data 
across, test it and then move the old 36 gig disks to another server.

I'm currently reading 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-5.html but if anyone has 
any suggestions to a HOWTO that may be better/easier please let me know

Thanks
Kai
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