Topic: HOT spare drives.

[Tony Olesen]

Has anybody implemented a raid1 with HotSpare on a SME server??

It should be very easy, if raidmonitor sees a failed drive, it could just execute the raidhotadd command for the spare drive, thus leaving plenty of time to schedule a shutdown of the system (in weekends, or whenever..).

After the admin has installed a new (working drive), it could then be up to him to decide if he wants to make the new drive the HotSpare, or if wants to make the new drive a part of the raid1 array...

Perhaps this could be done via a manager-panel??? - Anybody?? Darell May, Dan Brown or perhaps Charlie....


This would be a very nice way to up the SME distribution a bit on the "enterprise ladder"... Offering built in support for HotSparing, very cheap... But that is beside the point, it was just a matter of making raid1-usage a bit more convenient The main question here was: Is it really as easy as it appears, granted one has 3 HDD?? (Preferebly on 3 seperate channels)

[Reinhold]

Tony,
Since this is basically a 3-liner you might want to read:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

specifically you are looking for:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.4

Please note that "3 disks" could/can do raid5 where you'll have double the capacity.
If your hardware isn't hot-pluggable I personally don't see any compelling reason for that spare.
Have you ever looked at Darell May's ezserver page? Now there you can buy a pro-hardware solution .-)