I hate Linux! (v. Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS + RAID-1 + Encryption + LVM)

[Stereodude]

So, I'm about ready to pull my hair out here. I see in the 10 years since I last tried Linux nothing has changed. It's still completely unusable. Nothing is documented. Nothing works as expected. It may be free, but you clearly get what you pay for.

I'm trying to install Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS on two 500GB HD's. I want to put the HD's in Linux software RAID-1. I also want to use full disk encryption. This means I need to do a manual setup. This is where it all goes to hell. There are no instructions, and nothing seems to work correctly.

From the guides I found it seems that I need to create a small partition (~250MB) eventually used for /boot that will not be encrypted and then a larger partition using the rest of the disk that will be encrypted and contain the LVM set. It seems to set up the RAID-1 I need to create the same partitions on both HDs have them set as RAID Volume type. Once I have the two partitions defined on both HD's I need to use the Configure Software RAID option to create the multidisk arrays. However, this doesn't seem to work right. I seem to end up with 3 RAID volumes (2 250MB and 1 400+GB) instead of the expected 2.

I've tried this multiple times and can't seem to get the desired results. I spent many hours on this already, and I'm getting really sick of pulling the drives to write 0's to the start and end so I can start over again and still not have it work. :smack:

Is there any definitive documentation on this or should I come to my senses and use an OS that actually works?

 

[LunarMist]

Don't blame the OS. Perhaps you can get some training through your employer.

 

[Stereodude]

It's not for work, and I'm not in IT anyhow.

And, how is it not the fault of the OS that nothing is documented and that it isn't intuitive?

 

[LunarMist]

It's not for work, and I'm not in IT anyhow.

And, how is it not the fault of the OS that nothing is documented and that it isn't intuitive?

Was it designed to be that way? What were the user requirements specs?

 

[Stereodude]

Haha, I decided to try Ubuntu Server 9.10 to see if it was and different, and it can't see my USB CD-ROM drive after the first few steps of the installer. Funny how 8.04 had no problems.

Linux is clearly going to take the world by storm with this sort of solid performance!

 

[ddrueding]

I'm trying to install Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS on two 500GB HD's. I want to put the HD's in Linux software RAID-1. I also want to use full disk encryption. This means I need to do a manual setup. This is where it all goes to hell. There are no instructions, and nothing seems to work correctly.

Of course, because that is such a simple install plan that anything should be able to do it out of the box. In fact, that should be the default, just like it is in Windows 7.

Oh, wait, 7 can't even do that. Perhaps someone with no experience on an operating system should try something a little more basic to start?

 

[LunarMist]

Haha, I decided to try Ubuntu Server 9.10 to see if it was and different, and it can't see my USB CD-ROM drive after the first few steps of the installer. Funny how 8.04 had no problems.

Linux is clearly going to take the world by storm with this sort of solid performance!

Nobody has patience any more. Obviously it is not a product developed for new consumers. Read books, take classes, join an online community, etc.

 

[Stereodude]

Of course, because that is such a simple install plan that anything should be able to do it out of the box. In fact, that should be the default, just like it is in Windows 7.

Oh, wait, 7 can't even do that. Perhaps someone with no experience on an operating system should try something a little more basic to start?

Uh... Lets take the encryption and LVM out of the equation. It can't even set up software RAID correctly. This guide doesn't work. I create all the partitions and then it pukes when I try to set up the software raid giving errors. It's supposed to let you pick which of the partition that are set as "physical volume for RAID" you want to use in the RAID array, but it will only show 1 of the 4 partitions. So, it generates an error and when you go back to the parition manager you see there are now 3 or 4 RAID-1 arrays all consisting of a single partition.

In Windows XP I hit F6, load a RAID driver and off I go.

And, why would I want to try something more basic to start? Doing a chimp GUI install doesn't help me at all. I need RAID and encryption. Setting up my server without them is pointless. Next time you want help with your camera I'm going to tell you to get a P&S and learn on it first because it's more basic.

 

[ddrueding]

I have yet to start a thread titled "I hate DSLRs!" where I stated that all I wanted was to take some astral photography shots using 30 minute exposures, and that digital cameras obviously weren't ready for prime-time, because I've had mine for a week and the stupid thing didn't work.

 

[ddrueding]

I know practically nothing about Linux, but I do know that it is able to do actual software RAID, where there is no special tricks to the controller at all. I also know that it sometimes doesn't play well with BIOS-based RAID (eg ICH10R). Which are you trying to do?

 

[LunarMist]

Uh... Lets take the encryption and LVM out of the equation. It can't even set up software RAID correctly. This guide doesn't work. I create all the partitions and then it pukes when I try to set up the software raid giving errors. It's supposed to let you pick which of the partition that are set as "physical volume for RAID" you want to use in the RAID array, but it will only show 1 of the 4 partitions. So, it generates an error and when you go back to the parition manager you see there are now 3 or 4 RAID-1 arrays all consisting of a single partition.

In Windows XP I hit F6, load a RAID driver and off I go.

And, why would I want to try something more basic to start? Doing a chimp GUI install doesn't help me at all. I need RAID and encryption. Setting up my server without them is pointless. Next time you want help with your camera I'm going to tell you to get a P&S and learn on it first because it's more basic.

I don't know sh*t about Ubuntu, yet I don't blame the product for my lack of knowledge. It does not bother me in the slightest. (I know much more about Bantus. )

Do you see it as a weakness that you cannot instantly understand something without education or help? Maybe it is some gender/cultural psychological thing.

I hope you don't take this all negatively as I am trying to analyze, not criticize.

 

[Stereodude]

I know practically nothing about Linux, but I do know that it is able to do actual software RAID, where there is no special tricks to the controller at all. I also know that it sometimes doesn't play well with BIOS-based RAID (eg ICH10R). Which are you trying to do?

Either would make me happy, but neither works. It doesn't basically doesn't support the BIOS based RAID unless you integrate some additional modules into the kernel, and that's only recommended if you're using it on a dual boot system where windows uses the BIOS based RAID. So that's fine and I've got BIOS RAID disabled that and have been attempting to use software based RAID. I'm not claiming that Linux can't do software based RAID. What I'm claiming is that the tools / utilities included on the Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS install CD can't set it up correctly on my hardware and that I've wasted probably 10 hours trying to make it work.

Hoping that a newer version of the OS would work better, I tried Ubuntu Server 9.10. But, it won't install from a USB CD-ROM drive because it can't find the CD-ROM drive after it gets past the initial few steps (I'm not the only one who found this issue). So, not one to give up I put it on a USB flash drive and booted from it, but that doesn't work either. It boots, brings up the menu (just like the CD) and when you pick the option from the menu to install it, it gives a blank screen for a few seconds, resets the computer and inevitably brings you right back to the same menu.

Basically I'm frustrated beyond belief that something that should be pretty simple and straight forward is seemingly impossible. Every path I've attempted to utilize has ended in a catastrophic failure.

 

[ddrueding]

I can certainly understand your frustration. And despite the complexity of that setup, I can see how useful it would be, and actually would have use for a few just like it.

 

[Mercutio]

Basically I'm frustrated beyond belief that something that should be pretty simple and straight forward is seemingly impossible. Every path I've attempted to utilize has ended in a catastrophic failure.

Let's see... RAID, Volume Management and Encryption. Short of using an alien filesystem like HFS, I can't actually imagine a more complicated setup. You admit to not having *nix experience and you're not really asking for help.

Maybe a setup like this should not have been your first choice?

 

[Stereodude]

Let's see... RAID, Volume Management and Encryption. Short of using an alien filesystem like HFS, I can't actually imagine a more complicated setup. You admit to not having *nix experience and you're not really asking for help.

Maybe a setup like this should not have been your first choice?

Well, someone didn't read the thread... :nono:

I can't even get the RAID-1 component working (first step). So if you reduce it down to just that, it's pretty simple. Further, I don't really care about volume management. As I understand it, it allows the entire disk to be encrypted at once instead of having a handful of encrypted partitions.

This was the solution that was recommended to me by my buddy who's more familiar with Linux than I am. However, he's never tried it either, so he hasn't been able to help me much. I did a lot of searching online and haven't found any real alternative solutions. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if there's some incompatibility between the version of Ubuntu I'm using and my hardware.

Lastly, yes the thread is a bit of a rant. Most of the members of this forum seem to be Windows centric, so I wasn't exactly coming here looking for help, but more to vent. All my Linux experience is 10+ years old, so not real relevant.

 

[Mercutio]

Before you go off blaming Linux, why not try a platform with a different installer, like SuSE or RedHat/Centos?

 

[Stereodude]

I suppose that's an option.

Uhh.. You have got to be kidding me. I tried exactly what's in this guide and it worked fine. When I try it with only 2 partitions per disk (like I've been trying all along) it doesn't work. With only 1 RAID partition per disk it works.

So, two RAID partitions + one 100MB unused dummy partition per disk and it's happy.

Why that's so obvious... I just needed an odd number of partitions... :frusty:

 

[Mercutio]

I couldn't begin to tell you what the issue might be with that. I'm not an Ubuntu fan. It has too many Debian cooties (Debian people being the FSF "It has to be GNU/Linux and not just Linux" morons).

Hopefully you made a partition for /home and another for everything else.

Anyway, if you really want to use that head pounding on a wall graphic, let me show you some of the stupid crap I have to do to get a functional Exchange Server sometime.

 

[Stereodude]

I went with 3 paritions, swap, / (root), and home.

But, I just hit another roadblock. I decided to skip LVM and just put the partitions directly in crypto volume. It chokes on the swap partition. "The attempt to mount a file system with type swap in Encrypted volume (md1_crypt) at none failed." Googling it didn't turn up a solution other perhaps than to use LVM instead.

What flavor of linux would you recommend? This is just an rsync target sitting in a closet and will be running rsync through OpenSSH.

My buddy recommended Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS or Slackware.

 

[Stereodude]

Ok, LVM fixed that problem. It finished installing, but it doesn't quite boot.

Starting up ...
Loading, please wait...
[   22.435232] md: md1: raid array is not clean -- starting background reconstruction

         Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
         or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dec
  Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while..
ALERT! /dev/mapper/vg00-root does not exist.  Dropping to a shell!

BusyBox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu12) Built-in shell (ask)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initframfs) _

 

[Mercutio]

Slackware is VERY Unix-traditional. It's probably not a good choice for someone who doesn't want to invest time in really getting to know the Unix way of doing things.

Personally, I use Centos on my home Linux servers, but my configuration at this point is pretty bare-bones. I've been using Redhat or derivatives of Redhat since 1996, so in large part it's just what I'm used to.

I have one machine running SuSE right now. I use it more as a desktop machine, though the Enterprise SuSE product apparently has a lot of hooks for Novell technologies that are probably pretty impressive, too.

Are you using ecryptfs or TrueCrypt?

 

[Stereodude]

Eh... I think it's dm-crypt. The HD light is still on, so I'm not exactly sure what's going on. Is it possible it's waiting for the background reconstruction to finish?

 

[Stereodude]

I guess I should also point out that it did not prompt me for a password anywhere in the boot sequence.

 

[Stereodude]

After powering it off and back on it's even worse. It just says, "Please wait...".

I think I'm going to throw in the towel on the whole disk encryption and leave the OS unencrypted and use truecrypt to encrypt the portion of the disc that the rsync server will be using to store the data.

 

[Bozo]

I would recommend CentOS 5.4. It is a server OS without all the unwanted baggage that Ubunto has.
I believe you can set up RAID and encryption from the GUI install too. Maybe that would help.
My experiance with *nix is very limited, but CentOS seems to be a lot easier to install than the rest.

 

[blakerwry]

I would also nominate a redhat based distribution like CentOS or Fedora. I found that the whole disk encryption at install in Fedora 11 and 12 worked really well on my laptop.

I don't know that I can recommend linux software based raid - the last time I used it (~ 5 yrs), it was immature. Though it does sound like there have been several worthwhile updates to the code since then.


When things work well, are intuitive, or well documented in linux (or any software package) it's because someone put in the hours to make it that way. Unfortunately, many packages are lacking in one or more of these categories because of a lack of time or expertise on the part of the development team. Sometimes it just takes time for the software to mature.

 

[Stereodude]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I have downloaded the DVD image for CentOS 5.4 and am in the process of downloading Fedora 12. I will probably try CentOS first since it's supposedly more enterprise oriented and more stable.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't know that I can recommend linux software based raid - the last time I used it (~ 5 yrs), it was immature. Though it does sound like there have been several worthwhile updates to the code since then.

I've been using Linux softRAID a lot longer than that. It's worked beautifully for years, though LVM wasn't particularly polished and I don't think there was much in the way of install-time support for it.

 

[timwhit]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I have downloaded the DVD image for CentOS 5.4 and am in the process of downloading Fedora 12. I will probably try CentOS first since it's supposedly more enterprise oriented and more stable.

I run Fedora 12 at home and it is fine for a desktop machine, but I probably wouldn't recommend it for a server unless you need the latest release of various packages. Each version is only supported for 13 months from release, so Fedora 12 support ends around December 2010. Upgrading isn't all that hard. I did in in-place upgrade from FC11 and only had a few problems. But, for your needs it simply changes too fast and requires too much manual intervention.

If you do go with a Red Hat based distro, TrueCrypt is referred to as RealCrypt in the repos. I believe it's only available as part of RPM Fusion. This is at least true for Fedora, not sure about CentOS. You can also build TrueCrypt manually, but it's much nicer to install through yum.

 

[blakerwry]

The benefit of CentOS is that it is using code that has had a longer period of time to be vetted in the community and by RedHat. This code freeze does have the distinct advantage that it allows documentation to be written based on the code that is published and continues to be distributed for a longer period of time. Updates rarely add new features (mainly fix bugs and security holes) so the documentation does not change significantly. And because the updates do not add new features they rarely break anything (this being the main enterprise feature of CentOS, in my opinion).


With Fedora, I typically have 100-200MB of updates to apply each month, this is the biggest caveot of Fedora. With each new update brings new features, better hardware support, and ease of use, but also the chance that something will break. For example, there were 3 different kernels released in the last couple months that would not boot on my laptop (video driver changes). If I had not known how to select a different kernel in the bootloader I would have had trouble.

With Fedora, the code changes so often that documentation is out of date as soon as it's written. Hopefully, the developers maintain consistency with previous releases and established documentation.... and try not to break anything.


If CentOS works for you, great, stick with it. I have nearly a dozen servers running CentOS that take only a few hours every few months to perform updates on.

But if not, definitely give Fedora a whirl. More than likely one will meet your needs.

 

[blakerwry]

I've been using Linux softRAID a lot longer than that. It's worked beautifully for years, though LVM wasn't particularly polished and I don't think there was much in the way of install-time support for it.

I distinctly remember using the RAID4/5 driver (each driver is basically separate). My system became unresponsive when an IDE drive died.

Since the system was unresponsive, I was forced to hard boot. This left the array degraded (dead drive) and dirty (drives out of sync). The RAID4/5 module had an if statement that prohibited it from mounting an array that was both dirty and degraded - a condition that is likely common to happen in consumer level hardware - even when using the --force options.

I had to download kernel source, comment out the if statement, recompile the kernel, and then boot with the new kernel to mount the array. After that point I went with a hardware RAID controller.

Perhaps if I had a better controller or SATA drives were available when I built the system I would have been in better shape. But as it was, it seems the failed drive hung the controller (a VIA KT266/333 I believe). In my opinion the Linux software should have been able to account for this fact and be able to mount the array read only - a hardware (or even pseudo hardware) RAID controller would have.

 

[Stereodude]

Well, so far I'm liking CentOS. It was able to setup the RAID-1 + Encrpytion + LVM on the two disks without any issues. It was straight forward and all done inside the GUI. No goofy partition quirkiness like Ubuntu Server 8.04. It didn't lose the optical drive like Ubuntu Server 9.10 either. Right now the drives are formatting. Hopefully it will actually boot once it's done installing. :errr:

 

[Stereodude]

Well, it boots and runs.

Somehow I managed to end up with TWM and it says Gnome isn't installed after a reboot though.

I had to yum it back onto the system. Odd...

 

[timwhit]

Well, so far I'm liking CentOS. It was able to setup the RAID-1 + Encrpytion + LVM on the two disks without any issues. It was straight forward and all done inside the GUI. No goofy partition quirkiness like Ubuntu Server 8.04. It didn't lose the optical drive like Ubuntu Server 9.10 either. Right now the drives are formatting. Hopefully it will actually boot once it's done installing. :errr:

What's your reason for wanting LVM? I found it just complicated everything for me.

 

[timwhit]

Well, it boots and runs.

Somehow I managed to end up with TWM and it says Gnome isn't installed after a reboot though.

I had to yum it back onto the system. Odd...

Maybe we should change the title of this post to I hate Ubuntu.

 

[Stereodude]

What's your reason for wanting LVM? I found it just complicated everything for me.

No particular reason for LVM. Ubuntu wouldn't work without it. I'm pretty new to Linux, so the ability to resize the partitions might come in handy if I set up something very wrong though.

 

[timwhit]

No particular reason for LVM. Ubuntu wouldn't work without it. I'm pretty new to Linux, so the ability to resize the partitions might come in handy if I set up something very wrong though.

You can resize partitions without LVM. I found that resizing a partition with LVM to be a much more complicated procedure than without. I have used GParted to resize partitions several times. There's even a GParted boot ISO you can use to resize your boot partition. GParted doesn't support LVM very well when I tried it.

I'm not sure if LVM buys you anything with RAID though.

 

[Stereodude]

Now I'm stuck on Madwifi... Supposedly it supports the AR928x in the system. I found some instructions on how to install it into CentOS, I did all that, but there's still only the wired ethernet driver in the network device hardware and I didn't see any relevant device listed when I go to add a new network device manually.

 

[Stereodude]

You can resize partitions without LVM. I found that resizing a partition with LVM to be a much more complicated procedure than without. I have used GParted to resize partitions several times. There's even a GParted boot ISO you can use to resize your boot partition. GParted doesn't support LVM very well when I tried it.

I'm not sure if LVM buys you anything with RAID though.

A few thoughts...

What about the warnings about not being able to change the partitions once they're encrypted? Or does that mean the encryption container itself can't be resized, not that the partitions in it the container can't be resized?

I thought the whole idea of LVM was to allow you to resize partitions without any sort of utility through it's native support?

I guess I don't see any real disadvantage to using LVM vs. not using it, but I'll admit I'm super new to all this.

On a side note, I'm probably going to re-install the system once I figure out what I'm doing to remove any side effects of the mistakes I made along the way and do it right the first time.

 

[blakerwry]

I thought the whole idea of LVM was to allow you to resize partitions without any sort of utility through it's native support?

It does, but it doesn't re-size the underlying file system.... so what's the point? LVM is basically software JBOD. It creates logical containers that appear to be contiguous to the block drivers in the OS. This allows you to extend a file system across disks.

I guess I don't see any real disadvantage to using LVM vs. not using it, but I'll admit I'm super new to all this.

It has all the disadvantages of software RAID (complexity, portability, bugs, etc) - with few of the practical benefits (mainly redundancy).


If you're going to extend a partition - you likely are getting more/bigger disks. My preference is to clone the partition to the new disk and extend the filesystem/partition. I would also recommend gparted from a live CD for this task. In the LVM world, they recommend creating a new PV and spanning your logical volume onto the new PV. That way you can have twice as much chance that a single drive failure will hose all your data.