[seul-edu] RAID tips anyone?

[Ryan Booz <ryanbooz@alumni.psu.edu>]

Happy New Year everyone!

I know I've posted a RAID question before, asking how to recover from a
failed RAID array... but with school starting up again tomorrow, I have
today to get my servers back in order and want to get this RAID thing
taken care of.

I guess I really only want some opinions.  I've read all of the
RAID How-To's numerous times and many other postings and questions about
RAID-1, which is what I'm doing for redundancy.

My first attempt at setting up RAID-1 was through the RedHat graphical
setup.  And everything seemed to work fine.  I mirrored every partition
(including /boot) and things were good until one day about 5 weeks ago
something happened (never figured out what) and the server locked and I
rebooted and then ran into all kinds of troubles.  Well, it turns out
(don't know why I didn't realize this before) that booting off of a RAID
partition isn't the norm and RH must do it through a RAM disk image.
Blah, blah, blah.... anyway, I've never "recovered" from that and have
to pass the kernel the root disk every time, which negates the array and
sets me up as just one disk.

So, should I try the RedHat thing again or should I try to set up RAID
from scratch - getting Raidtools and compiling a new kernel?  I did find
the How-To on moving to a RAID-1 system from a single disk system, which
looks interesting, so I've thought about trying that.   Should I not
mirror the /boot arrays (or /).  Just looking for a few thoughts in the
new year as I give this another try.

Thanks a bunch...  New Years resolutions to follow in the next few
days....

Ryan Booz
Belleville Mennonite School