[mythtv-users] CentOS vs Fedora, RAID vs LVM

[Jelte Veldstra]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:

> On Saturday 28 March 2009 12:09:30 Ben Curtis wrote:
> > Hey everyone,
> >
> > I have a Fedora based backend that has been running forever using a raid5
> > array with LVM over top of it.  I'm going to set up a new backend to
> > replace it, and have a couple of questions based on what I have read:
> >
> > 1) CentOS vs. Fedora
> > I've used Fedora forever, however I'm tired of how often a new version
> > comes out.  It's great for systems I play with, not for my main server.
>  Is
> > CentOS supported pretty well for Myth?  I'll be running two HD5500's and
> a
> > PVR-250 in it as a backend only.  Also, I can find a release history, but
> > does it always coincide with RedHat Enterprise?  And can the RPMs from
> > atrpms.net be used with it?
> >
> > 2) RAID vs LVM
> > Do the new kernels that are shipped with Fedora and CentOS have the
> ability
> > to use the mdadm --grow command?  If I'm just going to use one giant
> > partition, is there any advantage to continuing to use LVM?  Just seems
> > like one more translation that I don't need if I can grow the raid array.
> > Also, what partition do you guys recommend on either?  I've used ext3
> > forever, but the wiki said I may want to try something else.
>
> LVM does not give you any performance improvement, like RAID0 does, nor
> does
> it provide redundancy, like RAID1 or RAID5, so it just depends on what your
> needs are. IMHO LVM just adds another layer of complexity without gainng
> much, but others will probably disagree.
>
> Not sure if "--grow" is supported or not, I've always grown filesystems the
> old-fashioned way - back up, rebuild and restore. The drawback is you need
> the capacity to backup all your data. I use tape, but that's not too common
> these days, hard drives are cheap.
>
> The problem with ext3 was it would block on large file deletes, but the
> "slow
> deletes" option pretty much fixed that. ext3 has been working for me, but
> you
> might want to try one of the "exotic" file systems, some are very fast at
> deleting large files, but, as I said, that's not such a problem any more.
>
> --
> beww
> beww at beww.org
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>


I have been a happy user of CentOS 5 and atrpms.net MythTV packages. I have
a backend only setup with netbooting MiniMyth frontends. I really like the
fact that I don't have to worry about doing upgrades as often as I had with
my previous Fedora based setup (so I was in a similar boat as you are in
now). I have had a software RAID 5 setup with ext3 and now I have a ext3 fs
on a WD green power drive as the RAID array took too much power to run. I
have a second identical WD green power drive that is powered off most of the
time and once per night gets mounted to receive backups created by
rsnapshot. For me this allows some form of redundany with little power
consumption.
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