Topic: 5.5 / 5.6 / 6 up 3 Software Raid Weirdness

[Andy MacDonald]

Hello all. Currently playing with installing 5.5 and 5.6 and 6 update 3 on a dual pentium 933 system.  The board is an ASUS CUR-DLS with two 80 gig Seagates in software raid and 1.5g of Registered ECC Ram.
All possible hard drive combination options have been tried so far....
Here's the weird thing:
5.5 installs fine. Rips through the install with lots of flashing lights and progress bars. So it damn well should, I may add.  The post install configuration takes a while though...
6 update 3 installs okay too. Not quite as quick, but I got it up and running to my satisfaction.
5.6 installs slower than a full service pack update to Windows XP over dial up.  Even the keyboard response is belated when picking time zones.  I've not had the patience to let it run to a full install to see if it actually works..
With just one hard drive, it screams along for the install.
I've had a search through the forums and software raid has been problematical for some.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?

[Per Sørensen]

Yes, something similar happened for me. Install was normal one one drive and extremely slow on two. I had the patience, and let install in the RAID config and i turned out to be running fine after install. First thing i did was to install the RAID monitor RPM, to see what it said about the sync of the disks. It turned out that they where already in sync, so maybe that it is doing it in the install already. It's not the way it normally happens, but that is the only explanation i can think of.
The machine runs as a happy production server now and does a good job.

Per

[Andy MacDonald]

Thanks for that information Per,
I'll have another go at 5.6 tonight. I didn't hold high hopes for it having astounding performance when it takes 4 minutes just to select the time zone.
I really want to run 5.6! (Unless of course v 6 gets released tomorrow and all the add ons I like work with it )

[Graham]

Yes, similar experieince here too.

2 x New Seagate Baracudda EIDE 72K

Guess what ?

One had bad sectors !!!

Replaced and install went fine, albeit slower than
a single disc.

[bkamp]

I just installed 5.6 w/ software raid on 2 X 120 gb IDE drives.  The system ran  very slow for about 19 hours.  Top showed the CPU was maxed out.  Thanks to DMay http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/dmay/mitel/contrib/raidmonitor/dmc-mitel-raidmonitor-0.0.1-5.noarch.rpm showed the HDs were syncing.  After the 19 hour sync all ran very well.  

BK

[Per Sørensen]

bkamp wrote:
>
> I just installed 5.6 w/ software raid on 2 X 120 gb IDE
> drives.  The system ran  very slow for about 19 hours.  Top
> showed the CPU was maxed out.  Thanks to DMay
> http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/dmay/mitel/contrib/raidmonitor/dmc-mitel-raidmonitor-0.0.1-5.noarch.rpm showed the HDs were syncing.  After the 19 hour sync all ran very well.
>
> BK

Yes, that is the normal behaviour after install. But in my case and Andys, it seemed to sync DURING install, since (on my machine) there where no sync after install. And raidmonitor showed good RAID
Could this be a driver thing with certain chipsets maybe.
I installed on an older PIII ASUS board with this controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (From phpsysinfo)

Per

[Andy MacDonald]

Thanks, Graham, Per and BK.
The 5.6 installation was frustratingly slow, but good movies on TV help.
Top shows loads of 4.03, 3.86. 3.65 and 64% and  84% System loads on both processors with it just sitting there, doing apparently nothing.
If I've got to let it run to synch for so long, so be it.  Starting to be very glad that I didn't go with bigger hard drives now.
It's taken almost 18 months to get the bits for this server together. After 1 broken processor, three faulty mother boards, incompatible ram, ineffectual power supplies, dodgey iso images and real tears of frustration, it's finally providing a warm seat for my cats.
The thing that makes me wonder about it all is that there is so much difference between 5.6 and 5.5/6 in terms of this kind of behaviour.
Previously all my e-smith installations have been a breeze and I've had many converts to it here.

[Per Sørensen]

You should install the raidmonitor RPM now, like bkamp suggests. Then you can see if it is doing the sync or if it's already done.

Good luck

Per

[Andy MacDonald]

Just to document the end of this saga, in case someone else wonders what the hell is going on, after work it had all stabilised.
All loads down to nearly nothing.
Disks had finished syncing and all is well.
Now to trash it by sticking add-ons until it breaks and I have to go through it all again.....

[NickR]

The RAID starts syncing the moment it's created (i.e during install).  When the install is finished, the disks will be running flat out for hours, depending on size.  

What I do is to reboot after install, configure & then type :

/sbin/e-smith/config setprop hdparm status enabled

Then reboot again.  The sync process will then complete in minutes, not hours.  The server will also be noticeably faster with hdparm enabled.
This is with IDE disks - SCSI is much more effecient & won't respond to hdparm anyway.

[Andy MacDonald]

Thanks NickR.
This is actually my first dual software mirrored disk install using IDE now that I think about it.
Can't wait to get home and fire up hdparm. I had it on the list of things to do, but sometimes customer support gets in the way...

[Andy MacDonald]

Several times now I have tried to enable hdparm to speed the synchronisation of the disks after install.
It doesn't work, even following the instructions to the letter and checking against other documentation.
Any more suggestions?
It may be that the fastest way to install 5.6 is install 5.5 and upgrade!

[Charlie Brady]

Per Sørensen wrote:

> Could this be a driver thing with certain chipsets maybe.

Yes.

I have two suggestions:

- tweak CMOS settings - try UDMA mode 2 (IIRC).
- try 6.0beta3

The 2.4 kernel version used in 5.6 (a now vintage RedHat 7.3 kernel) has problems with some hardware.

Charlie