Last night I took this server down for an hour or two for some upgrades. First of all, it got de-dusted, and I discovered even the hermetically sealed P160 case is subject to dust and spider webs 🙁 I backed up my RAID5 data array to an external drive and then installed the drives I got through a boxing day sale. Everything slipped in nice and good. I also found that I could (theoretically), use one of the drives I took out to turn my 2x120G RAID1 array into a 3x120G RAID5. That would give 740 G of storage (I think). Only thing I need is to find the extra drive rails for that case, which I have no idea where they are.
While the system was down I threw it on a UPS as well. This is a little APC unit I aquired by default and really isn’t mine, but I’m using it for now. It’s got a USB interface that lets the computer talk to the UPS unit so the computer will shut itself down nicely if the power fails. I had to google a bit to get the info on how to set it up (how many TLAs can you find in this google search? 🙂
I found a really good apcupsd on gentoo tutorial that I followed and it worked great (once I turned on USB on the server that is). The test shutoff went well, and while I didn’t do a “live” shutdown due to loss of power, I have every confidence it will work fine.
Now I’m in the wonderful world of figuring out how the hell EVMS really works and how to use it. I think it can do what I want, which is (in theory) create a single massive partition (that appears to the system as a single device to put a filesystem on) from multiple underlying storage areas, in this case, RAID arrays. So I’d have 2 RAID5 arrays, one of 500G and one of 240 and they would combine seamlessly as a volume group into something that I could just mount as /mnt/storage. Of course, doesn’t that lose the security of RAID if one of those RAID5 arrays failed? Isn’t what that is creating (as I read it from the some of the docs). Of course I could have 2 separate data partitions, but I thought the whole point of EVMS was to scale…..
I asked about this before, with no real de-confusion on my part. Oh well, off to find more howtos and tutorials I guess.