Network Drivers, MD layer drivers

[WeeboTech]

I'm considering the use of unRaid for our backup servers.

 

It's ingenious mechanism of allowing multiple drives to be incrementally added as volumes with redundancy makes it an excellent candidate for backup storage.

 

I'm doing a feasibility study and trying to leverage some old rack mount hardware so I have a few questions.

 

1. Is it possible to provide the eepro100 network driver also. Some of our machines do not have gigabit network adapters and we are using 3ware controllers (raid1 os / JBOD for backup drives) which already use the slot.

 

2. Is it possible to provide the md-mod layer and management software as an addon product to Centos 5.

 

I would prefer this as our backup servers are not really uses as a NAS, but using a few different backup mechanims along with NAGIOS monitoring.

We currently use hdup (triggered from remote machines, rdiff, rsync & rsnapshot).

All require a fully functioning OS.

So my needs are to use the unRaid driver to add redundancy to the JBOD volumes (even though I am using the 3ware card).

This would convert it to RJOBD (redundant JBOD?) <grin>

 

Although the 3ware card is an excellent raid controller, our growth pattern causes us to upgrade and add drives every few months.

WE do not want to use raid 5,  and prefer raid1, however, we've outgrown the chassis and ability to use raid 1.

 

if unRaid were just an MD layered driver, this would help out tremdously.

 

 

3. ReiserFS.

Can someone explain the reason for using this, rather then EXT3 ?

Can EXT3 be used instead ?