Hi
2. 3Ware (I would love to use these cards, but they're not available locally).
Internet?
Delivery time is an issue, and also, if it doesn't work out, I need to be able to take it back. Usually I can do that fairly quickly, because all our hardware suppliers are within 30 mintues' drive.
3. Areca - available locally, but I'm still, after two months and many promises, waiting for a demo...
I want one of those as well, when I have to set up my next server. (^-^)
The only thing that bothers me about the Areca card is that tiny little fan it has on. Unless you open the box from time to time to check, there's no way youll know if that fan is still running, and if it dies, well, who knows what will happen?
If the Adaptec card works fine in 9.3 and 10.0 (it really does, I have a few of them in newer boxes), then I'll just have to do whatever it takes to get it working. If I have to upgrade the OS, so be it. At least I can do that on the new raid set, and I still have the old disc with the original state of the server on, so I can mess around as much as I like.
Please write about your experience when you are finished with your migration, it's always nice to see the result how things turned out.
Well, I found out why I didn't have any luck with the Mantel kernel. I decided not to keep swapping drives around, so I added an entry on the original disc's grub.conf for the installation on the new discs. But I forgot that grub sees both the discs from the original raid, because it's a software raid that exists only once the machine has booted. So I put hd(1,0) in grub instead of hd(2,0). After fixing that SUSE booted perfectly off the raid set, no funny stuff needed. So, to recap. I have two discs, hda and hdc on the normal onboard IDE controllers, configured in a kernel based raid-1. I have to move that to a hardware raid-5 setup consisting of an Adaptec SATA raid controller (aacraid driver) and 3 SATA discs. The aacraid driver included in 9.2 doesn't support this card, and trying to compile the source for the driver seems like a futile exercise. So here's what I did: 1. Boot off a live cd 2. Create partitions and filesystems on the new raid set 3. Copy OS and data from the old raid set to the new one 4. Download the latest Mantel kernel and put that in /root on the new raid set 5. chroot into the new raid set, install the new kernel 6. make neccessary changes to /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst 7. Run grubinstall 8. Unomount and reboot That should be all Thanks!