One step in creating a new RAID array that is often forgotten is to partition the drive before actually creating the RAID array. Its easy to forget since creating a /dev/mdx device will work just fine by specifying the disk without a partition number afterwards, like in:

$ mdadm --create /dev/md0 -n 2 -l 1 /dev/sda /dev/sdb

This will create a new RAID level 1 array (disk mirroring) using both sda and sdb entire disks. As well, LVM will happily create a phyical volume, volume group and logical volumes on the array (and subsequently create a filesystem).

In general, its really not a good practice to do this - there are a number of reasons, but they all orient around the fact that a disk without proper partitions is not recognized by various software / OS's.

1. The LVM HowTo recommends against using whole disk volumes (essentially an unpartitioned disk) - primarily because of the management issues - Most OS's for example do not recognize a disk as being used if it doesn't have a partition table. See here.
2. Some issues with NAS software if you have to do some things manually, for example a sfdisk -l /dev/sda may or may not give what it needs
3. Of course if you are using Windows, require an MBR for any reason (like booting with the array) then it goes without saying you have to have a partition table.
4. I'm sure we could put more reasons why not here if we thought about it a little longer...

Generally its not for us to question the way things are, just to deal with them as best we can… Let us not forget though, that occaisionally we do have the opportunity to pound circumstances into our own version of a modified reality - or at least, into submission. Therefore I say unto you - never give up, nor even consider the possibility of defeat. The other side is never that far away (those deer are obviously looking at something right?)
 

So I’m trying to get sslexplorer working on an upgraded (Fedora 10) web server for my home environment. Well - turns out its not my day…

The 2 user license I registered for at 3sp.com didn’t get generated for some reason (this back in Sept ‘08) and its been on my list of to-do items to contact 3sp.com about it. Seems the 30 day Enterprise trial license I obtained has run out also. Too bad because it installs and works great, just no license… (works great with my internal LDAP server - center of my environment authentication…) - also - 3sp has been purchased by Barracuda so there goes any further licensing possibilities for my machine at home…

So ‘enter’ Adito - a branch from sslexplorer before it was purchased by Barracuda. I download and install… unfortunately, it requires Sun Java 1.5.0 and Apache Ant - neither of which is installed by default on Fedora 10. Checking yum, it does download and install Ant, but installs more pre-requisties for GNU Java. After messing around for a while it does indeed appear that Sun Java is needed - manually starting the server yeilds an error message indicating GCJ (GNU Java) is not supported by Adito - so I install Sun Java using these excellent excellent instructions from my-guides.net. (Install JDK if you want to compile Adito with source, or just JRE if you use the binary) - also get Apache Ant. This is easy to install, just untar it and set the ANT_HOME environment variables (below).

I untarred Sun Java, Any, Adito and Apache Any in the /opt directory. You will need to prepare the system for the new Java as well. The following should be executable and go into a file called /etc/profile.d/java.sh

# Uncomment this one if using JDK
export JAVA_HOME=/opt/jdk1.6.0_12 
# Uncomment this one if using JRE 
#export JAVA_HOME=/opt/jre1.6.0_12 
export ANT_HOME=/opt/apache-ant-1.7.1 
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$ANT_HOME/bin:$PATH

Also put the following in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/java.conf

# If using JDK then uncomment this one 
/opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/i386 
# If using JRE then uncomment this one 
#/opt/jre1.6.0_12/lib/i386

Then run:

user@computer:~$ ldconfig

That will enable the Java libraries to be found by the system - Adito will not run without it. The rest is a matter of following the instructions for Adito. Everything is run by Ant - in the root of the Adito install:

user@computer:~$ ant install-service

will install the startup script

user@computer:~$ ant install

will begin the install server

user@computer:~$ service adito start

will then start the server

Hope this helps someone…