[Gllug] Production system - Linux 2.4.24, LVM and cciss

[Dale Gallagher]

Hi Ian

Thanks for you feedback...

> Assuming you're not tight on disk space, RAID 1 will give better 
> performance than RAID5 but RAID 5 will give you 50% more space as you 
> have 4 disks.

Have been through the various RAID scenarios and RAID 1+0 has been the
plan from the start; RAID 5 is too slow.  Even though I lose 50% using
RAID 1+0, I get the best of speed and reliability, which is one of my
fundamental requirements, taking prescedence over number of disks used.

> As you're using Slackware I assume that the installer doesn't support 
> LVM and you will have to implement it after installation. I havn't

Yes, you create your FS before running setup.

> My preference in such a case is to leave root in a partition. This
> saves having to bother with an initrd to get the LVM started up before

I think I'm going to put /root, /boot and swap on their own partitions
and leave the rest for the LV.

> You have plenty of disks. So I recommend installing with just root
> (and the Compaq partition if you need it) on the disk you intend the
> system to end up on and everything else on another.

For now, running everything on the 146GB RAID 1+0 disk array and backups
on the other 146GB disks.  Later on I'll split server functions onto
separate machines.

> Make sure that there is an initialisation script in place to start up
> then LVM before booting back into multi user. Debian does this when 
> installing the LVM software, I don't know about Slackware.

Yep, slackware already has support in its /etc/rc.d/rc.S script

> Use a filesystem type which can be enlarged such as reiserfs or you
> lose a lot of the benefits of LVM.

Debated this a while and have chosen ext3.

> > Is is really viable to use LVM and a single underlying partition on
> > the disk array in terms of reliability/performance etc?
> 
> It's never been a problem on my servers. And I don't think it would be
> 
> viable to run them without LVM, people would not put up with the
> outages needed for filesystem maintenance.

You have a point ;-)

Thanks again,
Dale
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