mdadm and raidtools

[Matthias Saou]

Warren Togami wrote :

> > I just tried mdadm yesterday on Fedora development, and it works really
> > great with software RAID1 and the test failures I made on my arrays ;-)
> > I really encourage everyone who's already tried software RAID to check
> > it out.
> 
> I totally concur.  Out of necessity I recently needed to convert remote 
> servers from non-RAID to software RAID-1, and mdadm was the only way to 
> do it since raidtools are incapable of making degenerate RAID1 arrays. 
> I then had problems rebooting safely into the RAID1 array, but that went 
> away after I totally erased raidtools from /etc/rc.sysinit and instead 
> added some two lines for mdadm.  (my approach used mdadm.conf, but there 
> could easily be auto-detect functionality something like Debian 
> currently uses.)  While on the topic, make sure you reinstall GRUB onto 
> BOTH disks after doing a crazy thing like what I did...

What I did was kind of crazy too : Started with FC1 on an ATA disk and
ended up with root and swap as software RAID1 on two S-ATA disks with a 2.6
kernel and grub properly installed on both MBRs :-D Works like a charm, I
tested removing either S-ATA disk... it just works and mdadm makes
rebuilding the RAID arrays trivial. Also, the mdmonitor service sending out
an email as soon as a problem is encountered is priceless!

Matthias

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