Backing up and restoring services, however, is not one.  That  previous post about software RAID on an existing system was the result  of adding redundancy to a small file server used by maybe a dozen  students plus faculty.  I backed up the configuration and data  directories, installed Debian Lenny (the previous system was a mixed  testing/unstable system), realized my mistake regarding the RAID  situation (more below), and then restored the config files and data  directories.  A quick restart of the services and everything was up and  running.  I love it when things work like that.  Linux may have a lot of  issues (like my sound disappearing after a kernel upgrade, grr), but  not with this kind of critical stuff.  Yeah, I know, samba isn’t linux,  but I’m talking about the platform as a whole and how services are  written for it.
The whole RAID issue arose because I realized that the server board had a Promise RAID chip on it that allowed for ATA passthrough or configuration in the BIOS as RAID 0 or 1. Sweet, this is going to be easy, I thought. During the install, the partitioner recognized the individual disks, not a RAID 1 set. Hmm. OK, I thought, let’s see where this goes. I will probably have to add disks to this later and I smell an mdadm lesson coming on sooner rather than later. Sure enough, the Promise chip was a fakeraid, which I should have realized when the documentation said a driver was necessary. Commentors recommended unanimously using mdadm over the Promise driver due to speed.
So there you go, another *nix utility let me get the job done without a whole lot of hassle. Sorry for sounding like a fanboy. How about a gripe to dispell that notion? Why doesn’t my microphone on my eeePC work correctly anymore after a kernel upgrade? What happened that broke my nvidia driver? Why is the sound only barely audible at max levels with 2.6.30?
The whole RAID issue arose because I realized that the server board had a Promise RAID chip on it that allowed for ATA passthrough or configuration in the BIOS as RAID 0 or 1. Sweet, this is going to be easy, I thought. During the install, the partitioner recognized the individual disks, not a RAID 1 set. Hmm. OK, I thought, let’s see where this goes. I will probably have to add disks to this later and I smell an mdadm lesson coming on sooner rather than later. Sure enough, the Promise chip was a fakeraid, which I should have realized when the documentation said a driver was necessary. Commentors recommended unanimously using mdadm over the Promise driver due to speed.
So there you go, another *nix utility let me get the job done without a whole lot of hassle. Sorry for sounding like a fanboy. How about a gripe to dispell that notion? Why doesn’t my microphone on my eeePC work correctly anymore after a kernel upgrade? What happened that broke my nvidia driver? Why is the sound only barely audible at max levels with 2.6.30?
 
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