Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Strategy for using SAN/NAS for storage with Gentoo...

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 16 Mar 2010, at 16:32, Steve wrote:
> ...
>> Given the point above I would also stick with software RAID.
> ...
>> If reliability is your primary concern, I would go for a simple RAID1
>> setup;
> Absolutely.  Software raid is cheaper and implies less hardware to
> fail.  Similarly, RAID1 minimises the total number of disks required  
> to
> survive a failure. It's the only way for me to go.

How does your system boot if your RAID1 system volume fails? The one  
you have grub on? I think you mentioned a flash drive, which I've seen  
mentioned before. This seems sound, but just to point out that's  
another, different, single point of failure.

>> If you do not need data sharing (i.e. if your volumes are only  
>> mounted
>> by one client at a time), the simplest solution is to completely  
>> avoid
>> having a FS on the storage server side -- just export the raw block
>> device via iSCSI, and do everything on the client.
> ...
> Snap-shots, of course, are only really valuable for non-archive  
> data...
> so, in future, I could add a ZFS volume using the same iSCSI strategy.

I have wondered if it might be possible to create a large file (`dd  
if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/large/file` constrain at a size of 20gig or  
100gig or whatever) and treat it as a loopback device for stuff like  
this. It's not true snapshotting (in the ZFS / BTFS sense), but you  
can unmount it and make a copy quite quickly.

Stroller.