[Novalug] SATA HD with LVM on RAID/ udev needed?

Brandon Saxe brandon20va@yahoo.com
Sun Jun 29 19:26:28 EDT 2008


I am getting ready to set up an LVM on software RAID5 using 3 SATA disks on Ubuntu Server 7.10 and I have a couple of questions. The 3 disks sit in a SATA removable backplane: http://www.american-media.com/product/backplane/sata300/sata300.html
The backplane is attached to a Rosewill PCI SATA card.

?- My SATA controller is a Silicon Image and hot swap is supported. Is there any special thing I need to do to let the kernel know when I am about to remove/insert a drive (of course after unmounting any filesystem first). Is it okay to just 'umount' and unplug? Does 'eject' matter here or maybe there's some SCSI commands I should issue? I am not sure.

?- Device Names. Depending on the order the drives are inserted/removed, the device name changes from anything between /dev/sdd to /dev/sdf. I have also seen /dev/sdg on testing. For reference, I have two other SATA drives attached to mobo at /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdc is a USB drive. Do I need to configure udev rules for each drive in order for my system to function correctly? OR will RAID and LVM figure all that out for me? 

?- Should I bother dealing with udev on this one? Even if RAID and LVM don't care about device names, I still feel it may be helpful to know exactly which drive is at which device node. Can anybody recommend why I *should* or *shouldn't* do udev?

Thanks much!
  Brandon



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