questions about RAID, LVM and Clustering in FC4 (+1 minor feedback about FC4 installation)

[Paul Howarth]

On Sat, 2005-07-16 at 11:19 -0400, Steven C. Liu wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I recently installed FC4 on a brand new P4 w/ dual internal 120GB
> HDD's.  As part of the installation, I used Anaconda to config the two
> drives identically in a RAID-1 arrangement.  Before I fully use this
> system, I would like to practice a bit with these new features:
>  
> 1. What are the commands that Anaconda actually ran?  (Same question
> for LVM.)

Fedora Core 4 uses LVM; you can find out information about this at:
http://sources.redhat.com/lvm2/

Most of the information in the LVM HOWTO is still relevant, but see also
the manpages for the commands, which will be more up to date.

For RAID, FC4 uses mdadm for everything. See the manpage. This program
does not need a configuration file, but if you want your mirrored RAID
partitions monitored, you'll need one. If you don't have one, you can
create one using:

# mdadm --detail --scan > /etc/mdadm.conf

You should then add a line:

MAILADDR you at your.domain

and run:

# chkconfig mdmonitor on

This will enable monitoring of your RAID partitions and will send you an
email if anything happens to it, e.g. one of the drives fails.

> 2. What are the GUI and non-GUI commands?

GUIs:
system-config-lvm for LVM. None for RAID yet.

Non-GUIs:
see answer to first question.

> 3. Suppose one disk has a problem, how do I go about breaking the
> mirror w/o losing my logical boot volume?
> 4. How do I make changes to my RAID setup on this system?  (I.e., new
> drives, striping, etc.)

See answer to first question.

> 5. How do I setup clustering?
> 6. Where can I read up on how to admin an FC4 box using RAID, LVM and
> Clustering?

Don't know offhand; try google.

Paul.

-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>