Installing Debian Wheezy on MD RAID + LVM

One of our computers has been slowly rotting for about the past four years. It was running services like RADIUS, DHCP or DNS and also acting as our backup server. After it started showing signs of severe madness, we acquired a replacement machine.

One of the problems with the old machine was that the disk drive used to store our backups wasn't in a RAID of any kind, which turned out to be quite truoblesome since it's the one that started failing. Therefore I decided to put everyting on a RAID1 on the new machine and also stash LVM on top of it -- that's a combination that's been working out quite fine for us on our other servers.

I remember reading a few years ago that it was impossible to have everything on LVM including /boot. However, these days it's quite possible and I was somewhat surprised by how simple it was to set up, considering that all tutorials and HOWTOs I found on installing Debian or other Linux onto LVM instructed people to create a separate /boot partition which would't reside on a logical volume.

Since I wanted to recheck the disks in the machine, instead of booting the debian installer directly, I chose the System Rescue CD. After backing up all that was needed, I created a partition spanning the whole drive on both disks:

fdisk /dev/sda
[create a partition]
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1
hdparm -z /dev/sdb

Then, using mdadm, I created a mirror on top of those two partitions:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

The version of mdadm on SysRescCD 3.8.0 seems to use metadata version 1.2 by default even though the docs on mdadm state it still uses 0.9 – YMMV. The Gentoo wiki page on GRUB seems to indicate both should be fine with GRUB2.

Then I went on to create LVM on top of that RAID:

pvcreate /dev/md0 # turn md0 into a LVM physical volume
vgcreate system /dev/md0
lvcreate -n root -L 40G system

As the next step, I created a filesystem on the new logical volume and mounted it:

mkfs.ext4 -v /dev/system/root
mount /dev/system/root /mnt/custom

At this point I proceeded to install Debian Wheezy:

debootstrap --arch=amd64 --verbose wheezy /mnt/custom http://ftp.sk.debian.org/debian/
cd /mnt/custom
mount -t proc{,,}
mount -t sys{fs,,}
mount --bind /dev dev
linux64 chroot . bash

I thought the real fun would begin now -- so far this was really straightforward. I expected there to be complications with installing GRUB, making customizations to the initramdisk to make it include LVM/md tools and other things.

Well, turns out I was wrong. All I really needed to do was the usual post-debootstrap setup. That means I had to set up /etc/fstab, install lvm2, mdadm, a kernel and grub-pc. While setting up GRUB, the post-installation script asks where you want to install GRUB -- I chose both sda and sdb. It created a grub.cfg which worked out of the box.

I honestly don't understand how it is possible that the whole thing just works. I mean, the commands to load modules for RAID and LVM are there in grub.cfg, sure, but the whole thing is actually on a logical volume on top of the RAID. It's just black magic.

So, yeah, it was all pretty much painless and much easier than I thought it would be. You just don't need to believe all those out-of-date HOWTOs floating all aroung the interwebs.