RAID info

Partly for my own reference :-) this is a rather useful page I found on RAID5 on Ubuntu:

http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=188

But my RAID isn't automounting. This is my config file:

lproven@lilmesh:~$ cat /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
DEVICE partitions
ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid5 num-devices=4 UUID=83287c83:7bd8c43e:c550bdfc:77fd6b91

(Isn't SSH wonderful? I'm typing on a Linux laptop on my new home WLAN, SSHed into the server beside me so that I can copy&paste. Small things still please me. SSH, wireless, Linux laptops... Why I could almost be mistaken for being up-to-date technologically if it all wasn't such old hardware that I acquired for free!)

Anyway, this is how my RAID looks on bootup:

lproven@lilmesh:~$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities :
unused devices:

In other words, zilch.

Now, it looks like, according to a comment on that page I linked, I might have to "dpkg-reconfigure mdadm" to get auto-assembly to work. Pretty sure I didn't have to do that last time. I'm trying that right now. It's taking a loooooong time to rebuild the initrd.

P.S. Ethernet sorted with static address. Am leaving fonts alone for now as I have a satisfactory solution! I've re-added my AHA1542 SCSI card. The RAID card was nabbing its IRQ, so I've reserved IRQ10 in the BIOS, and a reboot later, I can add it with MODCONF. So now, the machine has SCSI, too.

Sorted!

I did indeed need to reconfig mdadm after building the array. This may be a difference between 6.10 and 6.06, which is what my older main server's running.

For the curious:

( Output of dmesg... )

I am slightly concerned about the initialisation errors on the RAID drives. They seem to be working fine. I thought it might be because I was using plain old IDE cables, but I've replaced them with 80-core UltraIDE cables: no difference. Odd. I've only seen this before on failing drives, but these errors are one-offs, only happening at startup. Otherwise, it seems fine.

Still, for the nonce, this is only a test box. It's not doing anything really important. So I am not too concerned...