Ubuntu 6.06 Server LTS Installation with Software RAID Support

Well, victory is ours....sort of. See our previous post.

The long and short of it is that we ended up just removing that Promise FastTrak TX2 controller card and placed the two drive on the built-in motherboard controllers. Since we have some other devices we piggybacked both drives from the same controller which is not going to be as performance minded as put each drive on a different controller but for this application it is fine.

I thought that I would post some articles describing in more detail our steps and experiences in case it may be of use to others. So here we go.

Ubuntu 6.06 Server LTS Installation with Software RAID Support

1. Boot from the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Bootable CD (available from here)
   
   
2. Choose the Start Server Install Option
   
   
3. Follow and answer the standard prompts and entries until you get to the partitioning section
   
   
4. This is where we did some research and manually created 4 partitions, 2 on each drive in order to create two RAID 1 arrays. The best explanation of this that we have found thus far is here. We deviated a bit from this article however. Our primary difference was in the changing of the partition sizes with the largest being the root filesystem and the smaller being the swap space.
   

1. So here is our new physical partition view. (Be sure the root "/" mount points are set to "bootable" or you won't be able to boot into your newly install Ubuntu Server.)
   

   Drive	Partition	Type	Mounted on	Size
   Drive0	/dev/hda1	Primary	/	70GB
   	/dev/hda2	Primary	(swap area)	10 GB
   Drive1	/dev/hdb1	Primary	/	70 GB
   	/dev/hdb2	Primary	(swap area)	10 GB

   
   
2. We then used the above physical partitions to create these two Multidisk devices (arrays).
   
   

   RAID device	Type	Mounted on	Size	Members
   /dev/md0	RAID1 mirror	/	70 GB	/dev/hda1
   				/dev/hdb1
   /dev/md1	RAID1 mirror	(swap)	10 GB	/dev/hda2
   				/dev/hdb2

   
   
3. Once you have the partition looking like the above, choose that you are finished and choose "yes" to the warning about writing these changes to the disks.
5. Continue finishing out standard server installation prompts
6. If you want to be sure you can boot from either of the two drives in the array (like if one goes out which is why you went to all this trouble to begin with) then you need to follow the step to get the grub loader install on the second disk. This is in the same article under the "Make Every Drive Bootable Section".
   
1. Essentially boot the server CD again and choose "Rescue a broken system"
2. Follow the system prompts until you see the "Device to use as root filesystem" prompt. STOP!
3. Press Alt-F2 to go to the second console (TTY2) and hit enter. Here you are going to enter the follow command to mount the second drive
   
   mount /dev/md0 /mnt
   chroot /mnt
   grub
   device (hd0) /dev/sda
   root (hd0,0)
   setup (hd0)
   device (hd1) /dev/sdb
   root (hd1,0)
   setup (hd1)
   quit
   
   
4. Now reboot your server. Don't know how??? "shutdown -r now" (This tells the system shutdown. The "-r" says restart after the shutdown and the "now" means do it now instead of in 10 minutes or whatever else you might want to include there.)
   
7. Login as administrator or whatever you choose for the username and password in the installation sequence.
   
8. Perform "sudo apt-get update" to have apt-get update the list of packages and the "sudo apt-get upgrade" to ensure latest versions of all packages are applied.
9. Finally I always like to install an SSH server right away so I can finish the system configuration form the comfort of my desk, a couch or some other comfy place. So run the "sudo apt-get install openssh-server" command.

A big thanks to the Ubuntu community and especially to Derrick Webber whose post was the basis for our successful installation.

Now in our future new production hardware we will further distribute the "/" root, "/var" and "/usr" mount points to individual partitions.

Blessings