2 disks as one

[Stickan]

Hi!

I've just installed Debian (no GUI, just shell) on an old machine with the intention of using it as a FTP server. With a lot of googling the machine is now succsessfully up and runs FTP, samba and no-ip. I now feel prepared to kill another old Wk2-machine and move the disks to the Debian machine.

Before getting the screwdriver I need some additional help though...

How do I format the new disks in ext3 format?
How do I join them with the old disk (creating one large virtual disk)?

Any help would be most appricated.

Best regards
/Stickan

[likwid]

You want to use

fdisk /dev/hdxx

to create partitions on the drive. Then you need to configure volume groups. This basic tutorial tells you how.

[Stickan]

Ops!

New on Linux and I have to rebuild the kernel? Things is really moving fast in this world...

Hesitating a bit to go for this method, isn't there a beginners way?

/Stickan

Edit: As I understand the solution is intended for RedHat. Isn't there a debian (and beginners) solution?

[drl]

Hi.

Debian "etch" (currently called testing, but very close to stable) has LVM built-in so you would not need to do any heavy lifting with the kernel. You will need to do a little work on reading:

The Debian installer has excellent support for creating LVM setups.

-- http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/410

I installed etch from the network, and it indeed offered an option to allow you to configure the disks with LVM.

My advice is to plan on avoiding doing much customization, but rather plan on doing a lot of installs until you get it right.

If you are using old disks, be wary of (so-called) RAID-0: you lose one disk, you lose everything.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

[Stickan]

I've installed 3.1 r4

If I understand this correct, all I have to do is to move my old disks into my Debian machine, format and join them into the existing volume? If so that's pretty cool.

I've no intention of running them as RAID0 or similar, I just want to extend the total storage space for FTP users (old disks = Gb < 10, not much today)

Screwdriver, here I come! (After all it's friday... )

Thanks drl

[tpl]

> How do I join them with the old disk
> (creating one large virtual disk)?

depending what you mean by "o.l.v.d." maybe not hard:
suppose you have hda (original disk) and hdb (new disk:
or it may be hdc/hdd depending how you hook it up):

now you can use fdisk and mkfs to set up some
partitions on hdb: hdb1, hdb2, hdb3... until you get
tired/bored.

now you can mount different directories onto these
partitions (see /etc/fstab):

/usr/src ext3 /dev/hdb1 defaults 0 0
/home/me/pix ext3 /dev/hdb2 defaults 0 0
/pub/linux ext3 /dev/hdb3 defaults 0 0

or whatever: and these directories appear in the
heirarchy starting at /. No drive letters or any of
that cruft. From the users point of view, files are
seamlessly available no matter on what physical disk
they may live.

[Stickan]

Tpl, that's similar to the way I runned filezilla on the w2k machine.

In a way, that's maybe the most secure way to do it even though it would be nice to don't have to bother by individual disk space limitations.

Well, now I'm going for a liquid screwdriver so I have time to consider my options until tomorrow when I will attack the hardware and/or the software.

Regards
/Stickan

[iwanabeguru]

Hi
there is no beginner solution for an advanced problem
but i have a half-solution for you
just put the hard drive to the debian machine , create the partitions with "cfdisk" , make the filesystem with "mkfs" (man mkfs) , make a directory in the
FTP root directory and mount the drive to the directory , play with the permissions and done.