[H-GEN] Software raid under linux

[Patrick Nichols]

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I'm thinking seriously about playing around with using a *software* raid
setup to use as my home directories.  I was hoping somebody had played
with this before me, and they could tell me if what I am attempting to do
is reasonable.

I have my home directories shared as a samba share, and these can be (and
are) used by the windows boxes on my home lan to save all my documents/uni
work etc...

My current setup is one large partition on a 3.2GB (disk 2) ide hdd.

I'm thinking of adding a second 4.3GB (disk 1), partitioning it into the
following.

/dev/hda1 - /     ~ 1 GB
/dev/hda2 - swap  ~ 64 MB
/dev/hda3 - /home ~ 3.2 GB Raid 1

/dev/hdc1 - swap  ~ 64 MB
/dev/hdc2 - /home ~ 3.2 GB Raid 1

If I do it like this, and disk 2 fails, then I've just got to find a
replacement disk for it.

If disk 1 fails, then I have to reinstall the system from a backup (which
will likely be held on the raid filesystem on disk 2 - cron based
backup?).  In both cases I'll not lose my data.

So if you have managed to read through all that and aren't confused I've
got the following questions.

1) Do I need to assign whole disks to raid, or can I just use a partition
as I have planned (/dev/hda vs /dev/hda2)?
2) Is it possible to recover my system from a filesystem stored on a raid
device? (as when disk 1 fails)
3) Does what I'm proposing seem reasonable?

-pat





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