Re: [PLUG] 5TB RAID5, GTP& CentOS-5: what's going to bite me?

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

That sound you just heard was a massive facepalm...

> Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:11:53 -0400
> From: "Gavin W. Burris"<bug@sas.upenn.edu>
>
> There is no need for the live CDs.  You can do this with a standard
> install CD/DVD.  The trick is, prior to installing the OS, create a
> ~100GB virtual disk with the raid bios, carving up the remaining disk
> space for your data virtual disks as you see fit.

Right, that's sort-of what the original person did.  Except he did it 
with physical drives (1+1 = 1TB MIRROR; 1+1+1+1-1 = 3TB RAID5) and 
losing 2 of 6 drives into the mirror really caused a lot of space 
problems due to the fragmentation.  It never even occurred to me to look 
that far down the stack to try and fix the problem there.

That also assumes that I can create 2 different virtual disks on top of 
the same 6 physical disks.  I bet it can though.  I'll test 
it.....and.....it can!!!


> If the installer then complains about the GPT partitioning, switch to
> the terminal screen and overwrite the beginning of the block device with
> random data:
> # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=64

I know Anaconda will complain about GTP; that's all over the web.  But 
since I was able to do a 250G VD as sda, and "the rest" as sdb it's OK. 
 I used MBR on sda and ignored the free space during the install, then 
use parted+GPT after the install completed for sdb.

That's a much more elegant and cleaner solution than I had, thanks!!!

Later,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug