So, blog has been offline. Wonder why? Hardware failure.
Raid 1 (mirror) failed after a power outage, its raid 1 though so all should be good. Not. I remade the raid configuration in the controller and it still couldn’t see the operating system. I tried to recover data, no go, couldn’t mount any part of the drives in linux.
Moral of the story? Back shit up, Or you will end up looking like a retard like me. Don’t get me wrong, raid is necessary, but if you don’t know much about raid configuration and recovery in linux, don’t count on it to save your ass.
Yikes, Raid1 blows. Use Raid5 if you can afford to lose a little bit of disk space for writing the parity information. Only requires 3 drives, minimum, and it is suggested to use 3 physical drives, not logical ones. I’m also a fan of hardware-based RAID, not software-based. Software-based just made me feel a little uneasy. So, get a controller card that supports RAID in the BIOS of the card when the server boots. With Raid5, you can yank a drive hot (usually, but depends on the manufacturer’s solution) and the server still runs. Note that depends — some RAID5 implementations require that you turn the PC off before removing the drive, although I would think that would be dumb. So, I purchase hot-swappable RAID5, instead.
And yes — backups are super critical.
Yeah it was hardware raid, didn’t have enough drives for raid 5. It sucks, but it was a lesson