Hard Drive Size Limitation

[David A. Bandel]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 20:31, Shawn Tayler<stayler at xmtservices.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 19:56 +0800, Yu Meng Chong wrote:
>> ----- "Shawn Tayler" <stayler at xmtservices.net> wrote:
>>
>> > I was running out of space oa database server partition and had
>> > purchased 6 new 600G SAS drives to replace the 4 300G drive that were
>> > originally installed.  The server is a Dell Poweredge 2950 with
>> > aPerc5
>> > SAS RAID  Controller, 2 2GHz Quad Core CPUs and 32G of RAM.
>> >
>> > Anyway, I used the controller to put the 6 new drives into one RAID 5
>> > Virtual Disk of about 2.8 TB.
>>
>> Hi Shawn,
>>
>> RAID on Dell is always tricky, whether you know the technology or not.
>>
>> For some Dell RAID controllers, the RAID array needs to be setup on boot, that is, there is a hot-key combination to bring up the RAID configuration when you boot up. I have, however, come across one particular type of Dell RAID where you setup the RAID array inside the BIOS configuration (!).
>>
>> The problem you are seeing seems to be related to the Dell RAID setup rather than Slackware's kernel being unable to support large disks.
>>
>> Did you setup the RAID-5 array at boot, or are you using software RAID?
>>
>> Regards,
>> pascal chong
>>
>
> Thanks for the info Pascal!
>
> I was finally able to figure out what was happening.
>
> The RAID was actually fine, the issue was with Slackware 12.2.  There
> must be some sort of limitation in the 2.6.27 kernel or the utils
> included in the distro.  As an experiment I booted the machine with a
> copy of Ubuntu 64bit Server 9.04 and viola!  No problem partitioning and
> installing the OS, although I would not recommend the built in
> Postgresql server package seriously FUBAR'd.  I built 8.2.13 from source
> after I had everything else up.  Even after I had finished the install
> and it was working, I tried to boot with Slack and it still could not
> make sense of the RAID drive.  So I am now running on Ubuntu.  I know,
> its not my first choice, but it just worked and sometimes that's what
> you really need.

Please describe postgresql's fubar.  8.2.x is seriously dated.  If you're referring to db problems around typecast errors, blame your db design or your code.  8.3.x doesn't do automatic type casting for you -- it might cast the wrong way.

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
-- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
            - Nemesis Air Racing Team motto
Visit my blog at: http://www.pananix.com/cgi-bin/blosxom


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