How To Install Linux Software-Raid on Debian 3.1, 3.1r1a & Ubuntu 5.10

How To Install Linux Software-Raid

Thanks to these people and their FAQ:

Emidio Planamente's pages: http://www.planamente.ch/emidio/pages/linux_howto_root_lvm_raid.php and Tado's serverconfig pages at https://www.howtoforge.com.

Tested with these distros: Debian 3.1 & 3.1r1a sarge, Ubuntu-server 5.10 "The Breezy Badger Release".

While testing ISPconfig according to the https://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_5.10 tutorial I wanted to add RAID1 on my server. I followed all the instructions from https://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_5.10_p2 and changed things after:

"I will use the following partition scheme:

/boot 50 MB
/swap 1GB
/ 10 GB
/var the rest of the hard disk"

I created the partitions on both hard disks (hda + hdb) as above (sizes optimized for my system) but instead of ext3 as file system chose Linux RAID for all 8 partitions (2 * 4, 4 on each disk).

After you created these partitions with identical sizes on both drives, start Configure Software Raid. This is the entry for working with mdadm (http://freshmeat.net/projects/mdadm/).

Create a RAID system of your choice. You can set up RAID0, RAID1 or RAID5. I have 2 hard disks, backup is the primary task, so I chose RAID1. Now it is time to connect the partitions on hda and hdb and create the RAID1 arrays.

Pick 2 equal partitions and bind them as an array. Do this with all 8 partitions and you get 4 RAID1 arrays. Close the RAID configure screen and you see on the partition screen 4 new RAID1 entries.

Open them one by one by. Scroll to the first one and press enter. Change type from RAID to your preferred file system and choose a mount point (for me: first one ext3 and /boot; second one swap; third one ext3 and /; the fourth one ext3 and /var). Go to Save and be very patient. On my server I had to stop with anything because the system slowed down dramatically for over one hour.

You can verify the build of the array's on a second console (ALT + F2) and repeatedly typing

cat /proc/mdstat on Ubuntu 5.1

or

watch cat /proc/mdstat on Debian 3.1 and newer.

You can see the build of the RAID arrays that way. After the build you have something like:

root@server1:/home/patje/install_ispconfig# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]md3 : active raid1 sda4[0] sdb4[1] 133596416 blocks [2/2] [UU]#Creating%20RAID%20devices md2 : active raid1 sda3[0] sdb3[1] 24410688 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1] 1951808 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1] 120384 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices: <none>

After this the Debian / Ubuntu installer does the rest of the installation. Now take your time and study the mdadm (http://freshmeat.net/projects/mdadm) tools.Have fun...