Re: Solution to RAID /boot issue in fc17?

[Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alex writes:

> Hi,
>
> I believe the ability to have /boot on RAID was removed in fc15 so in
> fc16,

That's news to me. Both F15 and F16 were perfectly happy with /boot on  
RAID-1, for me. I must admit that they were quite reluctant to do so, and I  
did have to beat the crap out of both of them; and I lost two good weekends  
fighting their insolence, before they finally agreed to /boot off RAID-1. 
But after I showed them who's the boss, there were no complaints.

>       /boot was a single partition, like /dev/sda1. I recently had my
> primary disk fail on one of my systems, and recovering with a failed
> sda was very difficult.
>
> Has this issue been fixed in fc17? Is it now possible install RAID on
> /boot so there are multiple disks that can be used to read the boot
> information?

There were two issues that made RAID-1 for /boot in F15 and F16 a nightmare.

If your partition table starts at sector 63, you're most likely boned,  
because grub2 too fat, with RAID-1 loaded.

Also, on some RAID-based system, anaconda kept generating a grub.conf that  
was a complete work of fiction. That, of course, didn't help things either.  
Fortunately, you can still boot in rescue mode, and run grub2-mkconfig to  
regenerate a grub.conf that has some basis in reality.

Now, if your partition table starts at sector 63, you're still boned. But  
not quite. If you're running RAID-1, it is possible, with the help of a  
rescue disk, and with stable UPS providing insurance, nurse the server into  
restitching all the partitions so that they now start on sector 2048, one  
disk at a time, without having to back them up, and redo.

Bugzilla tells me that F17's anaconda has a better reputation in emitting  
grub.conf for RAID-based system, so that's fixed. But, if your partitions  
still start on sector 63, you're still boned. You must move them.

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