Yuyo Posted January 27, 2003 Report Share Posted January 27, 2003 I am about to build a personal file and web server. The setup is as follows: Gateway G6-450 Pentium II-450 Mghz 384-MGB of RAM 3COM-595TX Card Cheap DVD-Drive Quantum 13GB HD 2 WD 200 GB JB in Software Raid 1 Promise TX2 Ultra 100 PCI Card (came with the drives) Mandrake Linux 9.0 Here's my problem. When I get to the partitioning tool of the installation, the installer only sees one of the two WD drives attached to the Promise controler. If anyone can shed light on why this might be happening, I'd be very appreciative. Mandrake has a very tuned Apache with all kinds of extensions pre-compiled, so if possible, I would much prefer to use Mandrake. This is not a hardware issue as Red Hat 8.0 sees both drives and installs allowing me to setup a Raid 1 between the 2 WD hard drives. I have used the Raid 1 to place my /home and /var directories there. I really would prefer to use Mandrake as that what I have always used for the past 3 years and know best, so lend a hand if you can. Thank you, Yuyo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yuyo Posted January 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted January 27, 2003 In case somebody can clarify the mistery, I went and tried Mandrake 8.2 and it sees both drives attached to the Promise controller and it is able to create the Raid Arrays from them. This really makes no sense. How can something work on Mandrake 8.2 and not do so on Mandrake 9.0? I wish I could fix this as it will be double work to update the much older 8.2? Somebody has to have a good workaround for this. If you can please help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted January 27, 2003 Report Share Posted January 27, 2003 You would need to ask Mandrakesoft why things that once worked, stopped in a subsequent release. You may not regret the extra time since you will avoid anything else that is broken. If they manage to survive, then I would wait untill 9.1 is released in April before upgrading too much. FWIW, problems have been reported in the past with both the Western Digital drives and Promise controllers but it would seem that these are not universal depending on particular hardware configurations. Counterpsy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yuyo Posted January 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted January 27, 2003 You would need to ask Mandrakesoft why things that once worked, stopped in a subsequent release. You may not regret the extra time since you will avoid anything else that is broken. If they manage to survive, then I would wait untill 9.1 is released in April before upgrading too much. FWIW, problems have been reported in the past with both the Western Digital drives and Promise controllers but it would seem that these are not universal depending on particular hardware configurations. Counterpsy Thanks for replying. Well, my promise controller was included with the drives themselves, so I assume WD would have taken the time to make sure that it works as it is included with their drives. .I upgraded the firmware for the controller and both RedHat and Windows NT 4.0 server can use it without issues. Mandrake 8.2 sees both drives and allows you to create a Raid Mirror, but doesn't allow you to assign a partition mout point to them, such as /home or /var. This makes Mandrake 8.2, the only version which sees the two drives attached to the controller, useless for the task at hand: a home file server. The more I use RedHat, the more I realize that it is harder to get it to do some things than Mandrake, but what it does do, it does it very well I have helped many on the road to Linux before and now I find myself puzzled by a messed-up catch 22. Red Hat 8.0 installs beautifully, looks great and creates a working RAID 1 array, but refuses to serve the files over Samba. If there is something silly that I am doing or failing to do, please enlighten me. The samba clients have been added to the Redhat machine samba groups with smbpasswd –a username. Still no go. Very weird indeed. Since file sharing works flawlessly between my Mandrake 9.0 Laptop and my Win2K desktop at work, I decided to copy over my working smb.conf from my laptop installation of Mandrake 9.0 and made changes to it, such as the computer name and workgroup name, etc. The Home user directories NOW work some of the time, but you can only log if the username you have matches the username of the home directory you are trying to access, i.e., you can’t map drives to a share by providing a different user name in W2K. On a side note, I have also noted that RedHat 8.0 is a lot slower than both Mandrake 8.2 and Windows N.T 4.0 on the machine I am using, which I never expected it. All of it, very strange. In Summary, *Mandrake detects drives on 8.2 but not on 9.0. *Mandrake 8.2 creates a useless Raid Array, since it doesn’t allow you to designate mount points. *Red Hat installs perfectly, but makes sharing files, at least so far, next to impossible. *NT works out of the box, even the software Raid. This is pretty sad, as NT 4.0 is now more than 5 years old. I would rather not use it, but if there is no way around this, then I can’t spend more time on something that should be very trivial. Of course, I could buy a 3ware card, but I don’t have the money to do so now and there is no absolute guarantee that this would solve the problem. I really like Mandrake's configuration tools, but it seems that it will either have to be Win NT for now or Red Hat, if I can get it to share files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.