Topic: How large volume? / ‘Large Block Device’ support

[stian]

How large volume can the SmeServer handle? I have a Areca ARC-1220 hardware raid set up with RAID5 + spare on 8x500GB disks. That gives me 3Tb. But the installation program gives me som errors.. I cant paste it in here since it only shows up at my monitor when installing. I will write it down if necessary. But is there any known limits here? I have installed it with 2Tb volume before..

[byte]

Please report to Bug Tracker. And try to take a picture with a digital camera of the error message and attach to bug

[stian]

Will do. There should be no problem tu use 64bit LBA option on the RAID to enable larger volume size? In the manual it says: This option use 16 bytes CDB instead of 10 bytes. This option works on different OS wich support 16 bytes CDB, such as:
Windows 2003 with SP1
Linux kernel 2.6.x or later.

[william_syd]

How large volume can the SmeServer handle? I have a Areca ARC-1220 hardware raid set up with RAID5 + spare on 8x500GB disks. That gives me 3Tb. But the installation program gives me som errors.. I cant paste it in here since it only shows up at my monitor when installing. I will write it down if necessary. But is there any known limits here? I have installed it with 2Tb volume before..

I was bored (or avoiding more important stuff) so I asked your question on the Centos IRC channel.

Wil_Syd>   Are there any max hard disk size limits for a Centos 4.3 install ?
   <Zathrus>   Wil_Syd: yes. Are you planning to exceed a few exabytes of storage?
   <Evolution>   Wil_Syd: yes. you can't have more than 1 Exabyte per spindle.
   <Wil_Syd>   No.. just 3TB
   <Zathrus>   Wil_Syd: that's a non-issue.
   <Wil_Syd>   ok..thank you.
   <Evolution>   Wil_Syd: you can't boot to a 3 TB partition.
   grub gets freaked out.
   and fdisk won't see all the space. you have to use parted with gpt
   <Wil_Syd>   Evolution: oh.
   <Evolution>   so if you want a 3TB partition, make a small 100M boot partition
   <Zathrus>   Wil_Syd: what kind of RAID card are you using?
   <Evolution>   beyond that, there aren't really any limits other than what your hardware can handle
   <Wil_Syd>   I'm just passing on a question for someone installing SMEServer which is 4.3 based.
   There is their original question.. http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=34031.msg145946#msg145946
   "Areca ARC-1220 hardware raid set up with RAID5 + spare on 8x500GB disks"
   <orc_orc>   Wil_Syd: Areca controller works fine w the provided driver from them in that config w centos
   <Wil_Syd>   orc_orc: thanks.

[stian]

Or perhaps it is not a bug?

Using greater than 2TB volume in Linux by "LBA 64" option

Notice : Please make sure that your system have ‘Large Block Device’ support enabled.
 
From this page: http://www.webconnexxion.com/raid/info_pages.php?pages_id=43

Does SmeServer have ‘Large Block Device’ support enabled?

[stian]

Here is my error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/anaconda", line 1173, in ?
    intf.run(id, dispatch, configFileData)
  File "/tmp/updates/text.py", line 511, in run
    dispatch.gotoNext()
  File "/tmp/updates/dispatch.py", line 171, in gotoNext
    self.moveStep()
  File "/tmp/updates/dispatch.py", line 240, in moveStep
    rc = apply(func, self.bindArgs(args))
  File "/tmp/updates/packages.py", line 568, in turnOnFilesystems
    thefsset.createLogicalVolumes(instPath)
  File "/tmp/updates/fsset.py", line 1438, in createLogicalVolumes
    entry.device.setupDevice(chroot)
  File "/tmp/updates/fsset.py", line 2025, in setupDevice
    raise SystemError, "pvcreate failed for %s" % (volume,)
SystemError: pvcreate failed for <fsset.RAIDDevice instance at 0xb7d8f90c>