This sure has been a nightmare to get my server running again adequately. I got almost everything working yesterday and today I tackled converting to software RAID1 so that I have a mirror. With most Linux tasks, there is some help on the web. A co-worker pointed me to a document for “crazy sysadmins”. I didn’t think that applied to me, until I re-read it several times and realized that it is almost what I need. I followed the directions and was stoked that things were going smoothly. Then came the hard part, rebooting. I always have problems with grub, fstab, etc. After much Google searching and futzing, I figured out the solution…I had to rebuild the ram disk image that got loaded so that it knows to boot off the RAID. This normally wouldn’t be necessary, but the default Fedora Core 3 install used an LVM volume and the old initrd file was based on that. So, I figured out that:
mkinitrd -v –preload=raid1 –fstab=/mnt/newroot/etc/fstab initrd-2.6.12-1.1378_FC3.img 2.6.12-1.1378_FC3
worked. It’s hard to tell from the documentation what is going on, but if you don’t specify the fstab file, it uses the current active one which happens to have the LVM mess in it.Just to make sure I didn’t screw anything up, I removed the original drive and setup a clean drive as the second drive for the RAID (I bought 4 drives with the idea that 2 were for the RAID and 2 were hot swappable spares).In about 40 minutes when the drives finish mirroring, I’ll restart the server and see what happens.I’m now convinced more than ever that sysadmins (at least those that run Linux/UNIX machines) don’t make enough money. It is extremely frustrating to have a server crash and then to have trouble restoring it. I also forgot to mention that one of the times I was restarting the server, it tripped my UPS and somehow killed the UPS. The UPS definitely has enough capacity for the server, but something went haywire and I have to get the UPS replaced. A new one will be here in 5-7 business days. I do have a spare, but it’s significantly smaller.