need some advice on getting a RAID

[nephish]

Hey there,
At my company, if our server crashes, the buisness crashes (like many today)
I have looked into setting up a RAID server, but i had a couple of questions because i want to do it as cost effectivly and debian friendly as possible.
in linux, specifically Debian, is it possible to just install two hard drives that are essentially identical, and set up the software to mirror the drives.
Basically i need a constantly updated backup of everything (OS, Data, files, configuration, etc) so if one were to crash, we could just remove it and reboot and go on with the show.

What would be the best thing to explore here to do this ?

thanks.

[mrBen]

Yes, you can setup software RAID in Linux (indeed, in Debian) relatively easily. The drives don't even need to be identical - just the partitions.

Couple of documents to check out:
http://rootraiddoc.alioth.debian.org/
http://unthought.net/Software-RAID.HOWTO/Software-RAID.HOWTO-7.html

[nephish]

Great ! i guess the main advantage here is cost. if there are others, let me know, i want to try to sell my employer on the idea.

[mrBen]

I set up a small Debian server quite easily - took an old machine, and dropped in 2 x 40GB drives. I partitioned them both with a 35GB partition, allowing 5GB for / and splitting the other 5GB for swap and something else (possibly /var). Works a treat - just looks like one device to the users, and mirrors perfectly.

If you _really_ want to go for it, you could, in theory, rysnc it to another box with RAID, and then use a heartbeat-type system to bring one up when the other fails. But that might be overkill ;)

[psych-major]

I recently set up both a RAID 5 and a RAID 0 using mdadm.
You can check out my notes here (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140760).
My setup is Slackware, but the same principles should apply to Debian.

[nephish]

man, thanks gents.
this is what i am after