what did santa bring you....?

[phattslagg]

Coffee grinder
Fat Face zip-up cardigan
Korg DS-10
Mighty Boosh book

[BBC-B Get'in'mah'bell-E]

Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Mirrors Edge
Some smellies
Some jumpers
Black Books DVD set

Some electric hair clippers (what they trying to say! - still quite cool though)
Micro vac for the car
BSG Series 3

Money and chocolates; stuff like that...

Corkin' I say!

[Dungeon-Dave]

It took five hours to RAID-1 the buggers

Hardware RAID? When I mirrored my 320GB disks it took a bit of time to fully construct the mirror - but the metadevice was available for use during the construction. I didn't have to wait, I could use it immediately.

Of course, if there had been a fault half-way though and all that...

Fatman brought:

The Boys, vol 2&3.
BBC DVD
Calendars
Lucifer, vol 3
I can Haz Cheezeburger? LOLcat collection.
A Terrible Aspect (story of Avon, written by Paul Darrow)

plus some drinks and other minor trinkets.

Footnote: this is my first Christmas in my *own* house; both the missus and I said there was some feeling of a relieved Christmas, where we've both been able to really relax. It's an odd feeling, something I've not experienced for many years during our times in rented accomodation, but I'm glad I feel more settled now. The Fatman didn't bring THAT gift, but he's a bit better received now!

[mutopian]

Chocolate
Mouse mat & Coaster
The Dark Knight
Wall-E
Bee Movie
Redeption Song: The definitive biography of Joe Strummer
Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations
Pair of moccasins (requested)
Set of Braces
Scarf
Amadou & Mariam - Welcome to Mali

Not a bad wee haul

[VNVObit]

World of Warcraft:Wrath of The Lich King (collectors box)
Charles Mingus - His Final Work cd
Books by Guy Browning and Simon Hogget (humourous writers)
Book on sporting terms (definitions of unusual ones)
a giant robot (relatively -about 18 inches - great fun with my son with this one but was a bit taken aback to receive it)
USB lights and vacuum

[Kelloggs]

It took five hours to RAID-1 the buggers

Hardware RAID?

Software RAID. I've had enough hardware fail that I want to be able to swap any old SATA card, or equivalent thereof, in-place if needed. (Thinking about it, I can't see any reason why one couldn't RAID over dissimilar storage technologies... but /dev/cciss and /dev/punched_card probably isn't the way to go). Besides, a worryingly-high number of HW RAID cards I've met sit happily at the RAID BIOS throughout the reconstruct, just to be able to give you a progress bar. I'd sooner have a running OS. (No doubt mis-)quoting from something I've seen elsewhere recently, "if it can't do a background rebuild, it isn't RAID, it's just backup."

When I mirrored my 320GB disks it took a bit of time to fully construct the mirror - but the metadevice was available for use during the construction. I didn't have to wait, I could use it immediately.

This, exactly. Ext3 onto the RAID, and away we go. (I just left it running overnight, anyway.) Wouldn't autodetect for ages, though, until logic dawned on me (at 2:30 this morning). The RAID modules need compiling into the kernel, but so do the SATA drivers, even if your boot device is IDE (which will probably end up SATAd and RAIDed, too)...

[defsdoor]

Left For Dead - see you online when I get home!
Fallout 3 - PC
Prince Of Persia - 360
Matrix Collection on Blu-ray (need to bring the PS3 downstairs again now!)

[merman]

Samsung 19" LCD HD monitor for gaming
New Super Mario Bros
Spaced DVD boxset
FWD this link - book of net virals/videos/memes
Ex-girlfriends Reunited by Matt Dunn
Ryhthm Sticks (to go with my Rock Star guitar, Rock Band without the console!)
Sweets
Pyjamas
Some smellies

[gumboot]

terry pratchett 2009 calendar

Does he go all the way?

[Dungeon-Dave]

but /dev/cciss and /dev/punched_card probably isn't the way to go).

I was pondering /dev/random and /dev/null. Go on, you know it makes sense.

This, exactly. Ext3 onto the RAID, and away we go. (I just left it running overnight, anyway.) Wouldn't autodetect for ages, though, until logic dawned on me (at 2:30 this morning). The RAID modules need compiling into the kernel, but so do the SATA drivers, even if your boot device is IDE (which will probably end up SATAd and RAIDed, too)...

(SATA *is* still IDE!)

On my DeadRat8 boxen, I had /dev/sda+/dev/sdb in a mirror. I needed to preload the reiserfs modules else it wouldn't mount at boot-time (did this with mkinitrd so they were in the initial RAMdisk image and repointed grub to this new .img file - job done!).

However, FC4 wouldn't auto-detect my mirror array upon boot. A google suggested that I needed to create /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sde1 partitions first, flag up the partition type THEN add those into the mirrors: partitions, not disks. Although it worked under RH8, it was probably more by luck.

I've not had to add SATA drivers nor the RAID modules in; seemed to work fine from that point onwards. Did you go for the partition or whole-disk option on yours?

[Kelloggs]

(SATA *is* still IDE!)

Personally, I think that's one of those more "honoured in the breech" sort of things. It's almost as if the SATA committee sat down and said, "Right, we need to keep 2.5"/3.5" disks and 5V/12V supplies, and keeping the IDE data layer would give everyone warm fuzzies. Now - what can we change?" which is why the Linux SCSI subsystem was a better fit than shoe-horning things like hot-plugging into the IDE layer. And then there's SATA hubs... or whatever they're calling them...

Mind you, if we needed an IDE layer writing now, it would probably make more sense to stick it in with SCSI... which probably just means that SCSI should be renamed as a more generic storage service... or maybe I just need more to drink. Then, of course, there's ATAPI, which thinks it's SCSI-over-IDE... and now I really do need a drink.

I've not had to add SATA drivers nor the RAID modules in; seemed to work fine from that point onwards. Did you go for the partition or whole-disk option on yours?

It's set up thus: fdisk /dev/sda and /dev/sdb to set two full-disk type fd partitions (AFAIK you need fd-type partitions to autodetect, and you can't fd-type a partitionless disk), then mdadm --create /dev/md0 -l 1 -n 2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1, then mke2fs -j -m 0 /dev/md0, then (now it autostarts) a /dev/md0 /raid ext3 default 0 0 line in /etc/fstab.

I think.

And the new server has just found the internet! Yay! (Which is why I can post, now; it's the house gateway.)

[VNVObit]

terry pratchett 2009 calendar

Does he go all the way?

Let's hope so
World would be a little duller without his semi-annual book releases

[HGFB]

A cold.

[Chunk]

Home brew kit!

Rock and roll.

[Dungeon-Dave]

(AFAIK you need fd-type partitions to autodetect, and you can't fd-type a partitionless disk)

no.. but I was able to get RAID onto a partitionless pair under RH8 (as previous post) - I did it properly under FC4.

then mdadm --create /dev/md0 -l 1 -n 2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1, then mke2fs...

You think correctly - just that I found I was able to bang in the mkreiserfs/mkfs.ext3 line almost as soon as I'd done the mdadm. I kept checking it (mdadm -D /dev/md0, or mdadm -E /dev/sda1) and although it was still building, the filesystem was perfectly useable. I expected a long wait until it was ready (like your 5 hours), but was pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, we're hijacking the thread. Back to the topic....