:: Re: [DNG] install on a raid 1 array
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Author: Marjorie Roome
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] install on a raid 1 array
Hi,

On Wed, 2022-06-01 at 17:16 -0500, o1bigtenor via Dng wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 4:57 PM tito via Dng <dng@???>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 1 Jun 2022 16:34:21 -0500
> > o1bigtenor via Dng <dng@???> wrote:
> >
> > > Greetings
> > >
> > > When the parts get here I'm going to be installing Devuan testing
> > > on
> > > the system.
> > >
> > > I have not ever installed like this so first the configuration.
> > >
> > > Ryzen 7 3800X
> > > Asus TUF Gaming X570-Pro   mobo
> > > 64 GB ram
> > > 2 - 1 TB M2 drives
> > > 2 - 1 TB SSDs
> > >
> > > I want to set the system up so that the drives are 2 sets of
> > > Raid-1 with
> > > (proposed)
> > > set 1
> > > /efi, /boot, /, /usr, /usr/local, /var, swap
> > > set 2
> > > /home
> > >
> > > How do I set up the raid arrays?
> >
> > They could be easily setup during installation process in the disk
> > partitioning step if I recall
> > it correctly. See
> > https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SoftwareRaidRoot
> > for more info (just the first part).
>
> Interesting - - - that wiki is current as of 2012.
> That's why I wasn't trusting the information - - - - the newest stuff
> I could find was
> some 3 or 4 years old and I've found that newer stuff has different
> gotchas than
> the older versions.
>
> The assumption is that LLVM is used on top of the array. (from the
> wiki)
> Is that necessary?
> (I've never used LLVM to date!)
>
> My idea was to partition the disks just like normal after the array
> was built.
> Is that possible?
>

I recently rebuilt my principal Devuan instance as a LVM2 on top of a
mdadm RAID1 array. 

Previously I had three mdadm RAID1 arrays md0 (/ root), md1 (/home) and
md2 Swap) on the two disks.

I now have 1 mdadm RAID array with a LVM physical partition containing
a logical volume group with / root /home and swap partitions in it. The
advantage of LVM is that I can resize the partitions easily and I can
also schedule backups from LVM snapshots, effectively off a consistent
version of the live system.

I also backed up the original / root and /home partitions and restored
then to their new homes. The UUIDs hadn't even changed though obviously
their location had (so fstab was OK). I chrooted into the new root to
run update-grub and grub-install.

Anyway as you can see you can do it either way I did it or you could,
as you suggest, just have a normal set of partitions on your new RAID1
disk.

NB. When I set up my original layout I did that as a new install using
the Devuan installer in expert mode (this was soe years ago), albeit I
then found the partitioning stage somewhat confusing as you have to
first create identical linux-raid members on the two disks first and
then assemble them into a raid array.

--
Marjorie