From: Vern <ve...@cw...> - 2005-03-23 00:28:18
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Hey all... I just set up a new box and I've installed 4 hard drives (had them sittin= g around and they're 10,000 RPM HAD TO USE THEM). The one hard drive I'm = using for system files and the other three are being used for storing web= sites. The one hard drive is the /home directory mount. I added=A0the ot= her two drives and mounted them as /home/extended1 and /home/extended2. M= y thoughts are once I max out the one drive I can start adding more sites= to the next /home/extended1 and then /home/extended2. Next I'm thinking = I can go into VirtualMin and "Module Config" and change something that wi= ll now point to the new directory however I see no way of chaging that. I= s there a way to do this? Does this sound like a logical course of action= ? Thanks =20 |
From: Joe C. <jo...@sw...> - 2005-03-23 22:58:57
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You're going about this wrong, I think, Vern. RAID is your friend. With three disks you can go for RAID 5 and get parity protection. If you /need/ all of the space, go for plain striping with no parity (but beware that one disk lost means everybody is down) or linear concatenation. Makes it all appear as one mount point, and can give performance benefits in most environments. Vern wrote: > Hey all... > > I just set up a new box and I've installed 4 hard drives (had them > sitting around and they're 10,000 RPM HAD TO USE THEM). The one hard > drive I'm using for system files and the other three are being used for > storing web sites. The one hard drive is the /home directory mount. I > added the other two drives and mounted them as /home/extended1 and > /home/extended2. My thoughts are once I max out the one drive I can > start adding more sites to the next /home/extended1 and then > /home/extended2. Next I'm thinking I can go into VirtualMin and "Module > Config" and change something that will now point to the new directory > however I see no way of chaging that. Is there a way to do this? Does > this sound like a logical course of action? > > Thanks > |
From: Vern <ve...@cw...> - 2005-03-23 23:29:35
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> You're going about this wrong, I think, Vern. =A0RAID is your friend. Isn't RAID used to mirror drives? And if so still don't you need a RAID c= ard? > With three disks you can go for RAID 5 and get parity protection. =A0If= =20 > you /need/ all of the space, go for plain striping with no parity (but=20 > beware that one disk lost means everybody is down) or linear=20 > concatenation. =A0Makes it all appear as one mount point, and can give=20 > performance benefits in most environments. Not sure what you just said, however I would like it all to appear as one= mount point. How do I go about doing that? Do I have to reinstall everyt= hing? I don't want to do that. =20 |
From: Joe C. <jo...@sw...> - 2005-03-24 04:17:16
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Vern wrote: > > You're going about this wrong, I think, Vern. RAID is your friend. > > Isn't RAID used to mirror drives? And if so still don't you need a RAID > card? Not on any reasonably modern OS. Linux has excellent software RAID and linear concatenation support, and I'll assume you're using some variant of Linux. You can even use Webmin to configure it using the Linux RAID module. You should spend a little time reading up on software RAID...the Software RAID HOWTO is quite good: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html > > With three disks you can go for RAID 5 and get parity protection. If > > you /need/ all of the space, go for plain striping with no parity (but > > beware that one disk lost means everybody is down) or linear > > concatenation. Makes it all appear as one mount point, and can give > > performance benefits in most environments. > > Not sure what you just said, however I would like it all to appear as > one mount point. How do I go about doing that? Do I have to reinstall > everything? I don't want to do that. No, you don't need to reinstall, as long as you aren't going to put the system on the RAID partitions (/home is not part of the system, and as long as you have no data on it, you can wipe it and start from scratch without any harm done). And even if you were to put the system on the RAID, it is possible to do it without a reinstall, but not without a backup/restore. If you already have data on /home, you'll need to back it up somewhere using a utility that can retain all necessary information. If you're using quotas, dump is probably the way to go. The Webmin Filesystem Backup module provides a nice GUI for dump. Anyway, here's the short story for what you're trying to do (though not documenting precisely how one would do these things): 1. Backup /home, if it has data. If no data on /home skip to 2. 2. Make a note of the partitions you'd like to join into an array. They should be roughly equal size. 3. Use the Linux RAID module to create a new array spanning those disks. 4. Make a new filesystem on the RAID array using the Webmin Disk and Network Filesystems module. Choose ext3 for the filesystem type. 5. Mount the new filesystem. 6. Restore /home, if you backed it up. Note that you can go even further than this. Linux has extremely advanced disk management...Logical Volume Management (LVM for short) is what you want to read about if you'd like to /really/ take advantage of your system. It's quite magical. |