mdadm / raid

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 09:31:45PM -0400, ron.peterson at yellowbank.com wrote:
> So here's my stupid question.  I now have two nice new Dell PowerEdge
> 2650's running software raid using mdadm.  How do I tell, short of
> popping a disk out, that all is well and good?  I have in fact popped
> disks out.  That's how I cloned the second machine.  But this is not
> what I want to do when the machines are in full production.

In short, you don't.  Whenever you are implementing something new, you
generally want to do it on a machine that is not already in production,
precisely because you can't test it thoroughly (e.g. for failures)
while it is supposed to be serving its customers.  Obvious exceptions
would be if you have some sort of redundancy (such as multiple DNS
servers, or SMTP relay machines, etc.), or the service isn't
particularly critical...

If the service you are providing is important, then the only way to
adequately test that this new RAID will perform as expected when a
disk failure occurs is to simulate an actual failure, i.e. remove a
drive.  Failing that, you just can't know for sure.  If you don't
really care if it goes down it doesn't matter much, but then you
probably wouldn't be putting it on RAID storage, either.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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