10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don't count on this to help you recover!, January 2, 2004
This review is from: Managing Raid on Linux (Paperback)
I agree with all of the other reviews except the one that gave this book 5 stars! One of the most important topics that this book should have covered is how to recover from a disaster! How to replace a hard drive and re-sync the data to the new hard drive.
GURB is now an important boot loader and it doesn't even talk about it! Did you know that if you mirror (RAID 1) your drives during install and use GRUB as your boot loader your second disk won't boot if the first disk fails?
GURB doesn't copy the boot sector to the second (mirrored) disk during the RAID setup! You will be laboring under the mistaken thought that you will be ready *when* your system fails. What you don't know is that it is VERY hard to find out how to copy the boot sector to drive #2 using GURB. I still haven't found out after weeks of searching and posting in newsgroups.
If you can't recover from a failed drive, then you may as well NOT have a RAIDed system cause it wont do you any good. I can't believe that this book would leave a topic like that out! Just my two cents.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
introduces RAID to the masses, March 3, 2003
This review is from: Managing Raid on Linux (Paperback)
The availability of HOW-TOs and newsgroups is supposed to make the sysadmin's job easier, right? Much as I am a proponent of the 'distributed learning model' for Linux, the endless searching for answers on the Web for setting up Linux RAID was getting to be a royal pain. Sure, there was a RAID how-to and an excellent newgroup, but some of the information is out of date, and the tricks suggested by people a year ago may be no longer needed today.
A person deciding to go with RAID faces a panoply of options and
gotchas. Hardware or software? How many controllers? ATA or CSI (or ataraid)? RAID 1 or RAID 5? Which file system or disstribution? Kernel options? Mdadm or raidtools? /swap or /boot on raid? Hybrid? Left or right symmetric? One poster pointed out that putting two ATA drives on the same controller could impact performance. Yikes! Didn't I do that?
Upon discovering that O'Reilly had just published its Managing RAID on Linux book, looking at sample chapter , I bought the book and let my blood pressure return to normal.
RAID is one of these subjects that is really not complex; it's just very hard to find all the information in one place. This is precisely the book to solve the problem. Author Derek Vadala, sysadmin and founder of Azurance, an open source/security consulting firm, has gathered a lot of information and even personal anecdotes to go through the decision making process when going over to RAID. He goes
step-by-step through that process, educating us about hard drives, controllers, and bottlenecks along the way. This exhaustive book may be the first to bring RAID to the masses.
Although parts of the book (RAID types, file system types) may seem already familiar to experienced Linux users, it is helpful nonetheless to have everything in a nifty little book. A section of file systems provided not only a rundown of the merits and drawbacks of each one, but also a guide to their utilities. I learned for example what "file tails" for Reiser are, and why using them causes performance to degrade after reaching 85% capacity. The book compares raidtools with
mdadm as well as lovely commands to email you RAID status reports upon boot).
People who use software RAID may skip over the chapter on RAID
utilities for the leading RAID controller cards. Still, there was one interesting tidbit: Why, the author asks, do makers of controller cards put all their BIOS utilities on DOS floppies which require us to find a DOS boot disk? Seriously, how many of us carry around DOS boot disks nowadays? The book made me aware for the first time of freedos, an open source solution that solves precisely that problem.
The Software RAID stuff was pretty thorough and clarified a lot of things. The book does an excellent job in helping to identify and eliminate bottlenecks and optimizing hard drive performance (using hdparm and various monitoring commands). The anecdotes and case studies definitely clarified which RAID solution is suited for which task.
I am less impressed by the book's sections on disaster recovery and troubleshooting. Although these subjects are brought up at several places in the software RAID chapter, the book could have discussed several failure scenarios or used a fault tree (such as the famous Fault Tree in Chapter 9 of the Samba book, a marvel for any tech writer to read). The book doesn't even discuss booting with software RAID until the last 10 page of the book and then gives it only a single paragraph (even though the author acknowledges it as "one of the most frequently asked questions on the linux-raid mailing list."). Call me old-fashioned, but isn't the ability to boot into your RAID
system ... kinda important? As someone who just spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting RAID booting problems in Gentoo, I for one would have liked more insight into the grub/lilo thing. Also, in the next paragraph in the last chapter on page 228, the author casually mentions that "all /boot and / partitions must be on a RAID-1." Say what? Please pity the poor newbie who religiously follows
the instructions in the book but fails to read until the end. I'm not sure what the author meant by this statement, but it required a much more substantial explanation and needed to go into a much earlier chapter.
These complaints don't detract very much from this excellent book, a true O'Reilly classic and a model of clarity and helpfulness. This book provides enough knowledge to avoid the dread and uncertainty that comes with trying to tackle Linux RAID. With a book like this, a sysadmin can sleep a little easier.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
For RAID beginners that don't want to dig too deep, April 25, 2003
This review is from: Managing Raid on Linux (Paperback)
I was pretty diappointed by the content of that book.
The graphs and the explanations on what is RAID are nice, but there are only a few lines about what to do if something goes wrong, which is the kind of situation you would like to have a strong reference on how to save your data.
I would rate this book as ok for beginners, but when you want to know more, you don't have much help, so a bad mark for advanced users.
I expected a more advanced work like on the O'Reilly book 'Using Samba' which is very nice, especially the Troubleshooting section.
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