[WLUG] Mysterious RAID problem

[Carl T. Miller]

Just an update.  I had mentioned at the meeting that
I have an unusual RAID controller in one of my servers
and one of my drives was down.

What made this unusual is that I wasn't able to use
RAID 1 on the hardware controller because the device
was not supported in Linux.  There was no option to
not use RAID, but I discovered I could use RAID 0 on
the hardware and see the two drives in the OS. So I
set up software RAID, which worked flawlessly.

After a recent reboot the RAID controller could no
longer see one of the drives.  I acknowledged the
error, and the server came up.  The mdadm program
showed that a drive was missing, but otherwise
performed well.

Long story short is that I needed to power down the
server, go into the RAID configuration program, add
the drive back into the pool and reboot.  Once Linux
was running, it was just a matter of using mdadm to
add the missing drive.  It only took a few minutes
for it to synchronize, and it's back to normal.

c