Wednesday, February 22, 2012

I got 99 problems

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?

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