[PLUG] BIOS, Raid 1 and Confusion

[Jason Martin]

On 3/23/07, Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2007, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
> >> I'll second this.  Beware of fakeraid.  Even if you get it running,
> >> I can almost guarantee you will regret it later. Think about it.
> >> Do you trust the BIOS/motherboard vendor to be responsible for the
> >> integrity of your filesystem? Linux software raid is likely to be
> >> faster as well as more reliable.  The only downside I can see is
> >> that it might create some issues were you to want to create a dual
> >> boot system.
> >
> > I'm definitely going to take this advice. However, so far the only
> > distro whose partition utility seems to be able to create software
> > Raids is OpenSUSE 10.2. And, while it created the partitions and
> > installed itself without issue, it won't boot. Maybe the others can
> > create sofware Raids, but I just didn't click on the right buttons.
> > I'll fiddle with them some more. Meantime, I deleted the Raid setup
> > that I created in the BIOS previously.
>
> Umm. I don't put servers into production at work without at least
> RAID-1 protection. I know from first-hand experience that Debian (both
> sarge and etch) and CentOS (and ergo RHEL) can do software RAID with
> little difficulty.
>
> Perhaps it's not obvious how to do it -- especially if you're using an
> idiosyncratic partitioning scheme (as I often do) -- but it's not
> extremely hard to do on Debian and CentOS. I'd be astonished if
> related distros like Ubuntu and Fedora didn't offer the same facility.

Dunno about Ubuntu, but Fedora definitely supports software raid in
the installer.  Additionally you can setup LVM on top of the software
raid from within the installer, in case you plan to grow any
partitions in the future.

Jason