Thu Mar 12 09:03:28 EDT 2015

A little cooler this morning. Slept OK. Made it to work on time.

Goals

    Work:
    - Wrap up Powershell notes
      Done. Also write Powershell script to monitor and alert on server disk space.
    - Work on linux boot notes
      Yeah, see below. I think this is what I needed to know, although I haven't tried it yet.

    Home:
    - Start LaTeX version of S&W Complete
      Done.

Linux UEFI boot with software RAID (and LVM)

    This isn't as ideal and painless as we might hope, but such is the cost of software RAID.

    Make sure the machine firmware is using UEFI booting.

    - Partition both drives with:
        - 512M FAT32 partition at start of drive; this will be /boot/efi
          (UEFI can only read a FAT partition to boot; software RAID will not work.)
          (The partition on the second drive /dev/sdb1 will not actually be mounted.)
        - Rest of drive as a RAID 1 partition; create LVM volumes on top of RAID

    The challenge here is to keep both drives bootable in case one fails, and not to have to remember to make manual changes anytime grub (or the kernel?) gets updated.

    As a (nightly?) job:
    - dd (or rsync?) the FAT32 EFI partition to the second drive
    - update-grub to know about the EFI partition on the second drive (Is this even necessary? Isn't duplicating the EFI partition enough? Maybe it is if grub is using UUIDs?)
    - Look at `sudo efibootmgr -v`?

    Note that contrary to usual practice, we do _not_ want to mount based on UUID; if the first drive fails, for example, we want the second drive to get mounted as sda.

    I'll probably need to refine these notes a little after I try the install and testing tomorrow.