BIOS boot partition, 4x3TB disks, and raid, problems with anaconda

[Lars E. Pettersson]

On 08/31/14 21:27, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> On Aug 28, 2014, at 12:37 PM, Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se> wrote:
...
>> Yes, that was my intention, raid1 for /boot and raid6 for / Accidentally I set /boot also to raid6 :)  But that can be fixed.
>
> Or do n-way raid1, which will cause /boot to have as many copies as you add member devices.

Yes, that was what I ended up doing.

I partitioned /dev/sda as I wanted, with space for BIOS boot partition, 
and also an EFI partition if I ever would need one (more or less a setup 
as described in <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1061478> I 
have not done anything to the EFI partiton yet though, it is just there 
at the moment). Raid1 for /boot and raid6 for /. I then copied this 
partition layout to all the other disks.

After that I started anaconda.

The trickiest part was to figure out how anaconda worked. It took me 
almost 3 hours and a lot of "googeling" to figure out how to use the 
"unknown" partitions in ananconda (click on the format). I would say 
that anaconda was not very intuitive... :)

> Post install you can
> grep -i grub2-install /var/log/anaconda/program.log

# grep grub2-install /var/log/anaconda/anaconda.program.log
17:56:30,287 INFO program: Running... grub2-install --no-floppy /dev/sda
17:56:36,970 INFO program: Running... grub2-install --no-floppy /dev/sdb
17:56:43,012 INFO program: Running... grub2-install --no-floppy /dev/sdc
17:56:49,195 INFO program: Running... grub2-install --no-floppy /dev/sdd

Splendid! I actually did this myself manually, but good to know that 
anaconda also does it.

> To know for sure how big of a BIOS Boot you need:
>
> ls -lh /boot/grub2/i386-pc/core.img
>
> Mine's 26KB, as my boot fs is XFS, without LVM or raid. Yours will be a bit bigger to include mdraid1x.mod and raid6rec.mod and anything else that gets pulled in. I bet it's much less than 100K actually.

Yep, mine was 31KB.

Well, my little home server is now fully functional, but not with the 
help of anaconda :)

Lars
-- 
Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se>
http://www.sm6rpz.se/