[Asterisk-Users] Re: What is the best Dell Machine for Asterisk?

[Mike Fedyk]

Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:

>On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 01:01:44PM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote:
>  
>
>>Administrator TOOTAI wrote:
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>>>Craig Guy a écrit :
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>>>>Are you using raid for performance or redundancy?  Software raid is nice 
>>>>except when the drive that fails is the one with your boot partition on it. I 
>>>>guess you could always tftp boot the kernel or something.
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>If you're using GRUB, fallback option allow you to boot on another boot 
>>>partition if first failed.
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>>>
>>Yes, and if you don't get to GRUB, what do you do?
>>
>>I very much prefer a Linux software raid setup myself, but you are 
>>depending on the quirks of your BIOS if your primary boot drive dies.
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>>
>
>Not really. When you run lilo on your raid1 boot partition it updates 
>the MBR on _both_ drives which are thus equally capable of booting you 
>back into your raid (1 or 5) root partition.
>  
>
That still depends on your BIOS to skip the first drive if it can't read 
the MBR.  I have seen several BIOSes do this with drives that report 
their existence, but still fail to return the data needed to boot from MBR.

Admittedly this was with desktop hardware instead of server systems, but 
that does not invalidate my point.  Booting from SW raid depends on the 
BIOS handling failure modes very well.  It is the same with HW raid, but 
you might expect them to test that more since that is the primary 
function of the HW raid controller.

Even if you hit a BIOS with this problem, it can be worked around with a 
PCI controller card that you test to respond properly to failure conditions.

I still prefer SW raid, but that does not blind me to the problems that 
can come from that choice.

Mike