Topic: Hard drive configuration questions

[Victor Richardson]

Multiple drives; I hust purchased E-Smith yesterday(hasn't arrived yet)
for a small non-profit environmental group (Surfrider Foundation)
that has 14 users. All do simple email,net surf/file sharing except
for the science director. He is using very large GPS maps for coastal
 errosion, tide, etc. Does E-smith have a problem with drives over 8 gigs(as some Linux distors do)?
Is it possible under E-Smith to place his files on a second drive of
the server/gateway with the others on the primary. Or, in a best
case scenario, place the boot and swap files on a small primary
(for speed), everything else on a second, GPS on a third.

[Kim Morrison]

HARD DRIVES: Victor:  Our system has no problem using a large SCSI hard drive (8 gig should be fine). If it's not a SCSI drive, our system would do respond like Red Hat does - we haven't tested on such a large, EIDE drive.  As for multiple drives, we haven't tested that either - it may work perfectly but we don't know. Perhaps someone in our development community has done this. Let me post a query to our dev-info newsgroup, cc you on the email and see what they say.   I'll also post any conclusions here on the bboard. Kim

[Victor Richardson]

I guess a better question would be "Does e-smith have standard Red Hat
server-install partitions?" If so, then it should be possible to use
 fdisk, Disk Druid, or Partition Magic to keep /boot and swap on hda,
move everything else to hdb, and have the GPS data and maps on hdc.
The only problem would be if the partitions have to be designated to
their locations during the install and cannot be moved after.

[Joseph Morrison]

Hi Victor, re: PARTITIONS: e-smith normally uses a 5 Mb /boot partition, a 127 Mb swap partition, and allocates the rest of the disk for the / partition. I can't think of any reason you shouldn't be able to move partitions around after installation using tools like fdisk, Disk Druid, and Partition Magic as long as you are careful about it. The e-smith software does not have any special partitioning dependencies.

[Victor Richardson]

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Easy enough to setup the
second drive within disk druid and change them to hdb. Now the tricky
part; how would I designate a particular set of ibays to their own drive?
Does your "create ibay" section use SWAT to create shares within smb.conf?
If so, would using it to state "path = /dev/hdb/(whatever directory)"
work for an ibay/share? And would your "view ibay" screen be aware of the
path for removing? What would be your best suggestion for adding the
second or third drive and designating specific ibays to them?

Hope I'm not bothering you with these questions, but I think as you
get the success you deserve for e-smith, more people will be asking
about multiple drive setups.

[Joseph Morrison]

Hi Victor, IBAY DRIVES: The ibay mechanism does not use SWAT; it simply rewrites the config files for Samba, Apache, etc. to take the new ibay into account. My suggestion is not to try to change the filename, but rather mount the drives such that the ibay directories happen to be in the right place. For example, if you'd like to create an ibay called "mytest", then mount your new disk on "/home/e-smith/files/ibays/mytest" BEFORE creating the ibay. The ibay will then be created on the new disk.