RAID

['Forum Post]

Scott,



Scott Wrote: 
>  

> ANYONE?? -), Winblows is looking awfully good right now....

> 



two days ago I had been very close to your insights, too but then I
started thinking logical. What the customer wants and more important to
me: what makes senses to implement.



I was very close thinking to call my reseller 4 km away to buy a
Windows 2003 server box taking the drivers on manufacturer CD and keep
going. Well now I decided against. Simply no more experiments.



Before I'm going to get flamed here: This way is just ONE way and
probably ok for just THIS customer. This is probably not a solution for
others being in enterprise market. So don't see this as THE insight at
all. I only do - like you all others out there in the wild - boiling
with water \\:D/ no magic no turns.



So: This machine I currently having here had MS Windows2000 server
installed on. It ran two months - crash - another two - crash. Strange
regulary intervals. Both times could be recovered. Last week - BAANG!
Again a crash. HDD had been corrupted completely so that even master
boot record was gone. Onboard there is a simple SATA controller. This
one was that guy that did this happen. Because of the situation and
because of my experience in/with Windows I am assuming that it has to
do with that Windows drivers and SATA controller combined. Could also
be the fax solution (Ken!Fax by AVM Berlin/Germany) - I really don't
know but having several other Linux boxes out there (since 1998 ) at
other customers - primarily SuSE boxes which !never! made this kind of
troubles. 



To the guys that are used to drive big business: This isn't the kind of
business I having customers. This is a real other world. Don't even
think to understand this :grin: .



Because of the rare and really strange situation the customer WANTS
RAID1. He will! get a RAID1 solution. But and here the important part:
Not only RAID1. 



So what:

A plain HW RAID - whatever one you are looking at - does not make sense
at this case because I don't want to invest more time nor more money.
Anyways it is a single point of failure. If one harddrive fails - no
problem. If two - well.. If controller or mainboard and controller
breaks you get pissed off =D>. I was talking to a friend who told me
another HW RAID success story: Even when firmware of same RAID
controller changes, chances are very good to never get back to your
data. Remaining - backup, backup, backup... and hopefully customer is
patient if something breaks.



SW RAID - well I could not get this Promise PDC 20319 running as boot
using initramfs and dmraid (faikRaid drivers) as boot. It did boot and
stranded into sh. So I came finally to the conclusion to do a plain
install on a normal IDE (a enterprise drive from WD) and get dmraid
working AFTER to locate the data on whatever RAID. This working now -
with fakeRAID - why not doing it this way? It is not even better or
worse than md until I can have a hand on it testing.



My plan is additionally having another bootable IDE - for things going
wrong - just open box, plug in hdd keep on going hoping that data are
not corrupted on RAID, too. And of course as backend - a backup from
day before. Again a patient customer standing behind... :cool: 



The problem at that customer is that they having a software that uses a
MS-Jet engine. Better known as MS-Access mdb database. The solution
keeps this file open as long any of his ten client PCs are running this
SW. So no runtime sync would be possible. A 100% failover solution on a
second server box? Well I guess it is not possible in this case, too.
Even if investing very much money.



So this being my finally two cent of insights regarding RAID decision
for and against in this case.





Samba as PDC is running on this box, now.



Maybe I should switch over data raid from ReiserFS to EXT3. What do
you think?



What I am actively searching for now, is a very good hylafax
description that helps me to configure this box as faxserver. And a
good description how to bind this using Windows clients as
sender/receiver. What I would like most would be a mailfax gateway (in
and out) with hylafax as server deamon. I saw that bitfax is doing
something like this. But I expect that this cannot be done in short
time :???: .



Any insights and good actual docs?



rob*


-- 
lptr