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The Wanderer wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Installed from the 10.04.1 "alternate" install CD, which allows you to configure the boot volume as RAID-1 during the install process.

Is that really so unusual? Debian can certainly do it without much trouble (at least as long as your partitioning setup leaves enough space on /dev/sda to play host to grub), and I took advantage of that as part of a somewhat more complicated setup on my current build...

Ubuntu "alternate" is essentially a tweaked Debian installer. You can actually do all of the partitioning (and MD/LVM setup) from within the installer if you want...

I've been impressed with how stable mdadm RAID1 is. It's a hell of a lot better than Nvidia BIOS fakeraid, which I've never been able to run stably.

The RAID-5 implementation is excellent too. The software department file server at work runs mdadm RAID-5, and I use it on my home file server. On a modern CPU, the performance penalty from doing software RAID-5 isn't bad at all...

Another advantage of using mdadm for RAID is that you don't need to worry about being locked into a particular vendor's RAID implementation. The RAID set should be easily movable to a system with a different motherboard or RAID controller, since there's nothing tying it to an integrated RAID BIOS. In fact, the last time we upgraded the disks in the work server, I built the new RAID set on one of our HP desktop workstations, copied the contents of the existing RAID set to it over the network, then simply swapped the new disks into the server (which is a built-from-parts rackmount server using an Asus server motherboard). Piece of cake... and minimal server downtime (just long enough to do a final rsync to pick up late changes to the filesystem, and the time to physically swap the drives).

just brew it! wrote:

The RAID-5 implementation is excellent too. The software department file server at work runs mdadm RAID-5, and I use it on my home file server. On a modern CPU, the performance penalty from doing software RAID-5 isn't bad at all...

Another advantage of using mdadm for RAID is that you don't need to worry about being locked into a particular vendor's RAID implementation. The RAID set should be easily movable to a system with a different motherboard or RAID controller, since there's nothing tying it to an integrated RAID BIOS. In fact, the last time we upgraded the disks in the work server, I built the new RAID set on one of our HP desktop workstations, copied the contents of the existing RAID set to it over the network, then simply swapped the new disks into the server (which is a built-from-parts rackmount server using an Asus server motherboard). Piece of cake... and minimal server downtime (just long enough to do a final rsync to pick up late changes to the filesystem, and the time to physically swap the drives).

From what I read you have to be using superblock (--metadata=) version 1 to do that, right? Not 0.90? I thought I read that somewhere. It seems the default setting, at least for Ubuntu 10.04, is --metadata=0.90 but I'm not entirely certain.

flip-mode wrote:

From what I read you have to be using superblock (--metadata=) version 1 to do that, right? Not 0.90? I thought I read that somewhere. It seems the default setting, at least for Ubuntu 10.04, is --metadata=0.90 but I'm not entirely certain.

Not sure if it is absolutely necessary or not, but FWIW it looks like we're using 1.02. It has been a while since I set it up, but IIRC I used an Ubuntu live CD to build the new RAID set, so I probably did use the --metadata option. (The actual server is running Debian Lenny...)

In other Debian/Ubuntu news, it looks like using Remote Desktop to access a system with desktop effects enabled doesn't result in a train wreck any more. This was one of the things which had previously caused me to add "disable desktop effects" to my checklist of things to do on all new Linux installs. I'm also quite pleased to discover that the IGP on the M4A78T-E motherboard I'm using for the new build should be able to handle dual displays, as long as one is digital and one is analog (which is the display setup I normally run anyway, since I run the smaller of my two monitors through my old analog KVM).

I downloaded Debian 6.0.1a and installed it and it was a much smoother experience. But I'm done for the night. ttyl.

OK, I'm very desperate here - can someone tell me how to control the fan speed of the Radeon 5770?

I've done some google-ing but have turned up nothing.

I've downloaded and installed the proprietary driver from AMD, including the CCC. No options for fan speed control.

How is it the Ubuntu 10.04 handles the fan perfectly but Debain does not.