Use second hard drive?

[texasag]

I have a fairly simple question. I have a dual hard drive ServerBeach server and noticed that the second hard drive is just kind of hanging out and not active. Having administered only single Linux hard drive servers, how do you merge the two drives together so that you can use the entire contents of both for your potential clients' websites. WHM's Server Information area reports the following (these are two 80GB drives):

=============================================
Physical Drives
hda: HDS722580VLAT20, ATA DISK drive
hdc: HDS722580VLAT20, ATA DISK drive
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 160836480 sectors (82348 MB) w/1794KiB Cache, CHS=10011/255/63, UDMA(100)
hdc: attached ide-disk driver.
hdc: host protected area => 1
hdc: 160836480 sectors (82348 MB) w/1794KiB Cache, CHS=10011/255/63, UDMA(100)


Current Memory Usage
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1030652 766352 264300 0 100524 456096
-/+ buffers/cache: 209732 820920
Swap: 1052248 0 1052248
Total: 2082900 766352 1316548


Current Disk Usage
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 75G 2.4G 69G 4% /
/dev/hda1 99M 9.0M 85M 10% /boot
none 504M 0 504M 0% /dev/shm

============================================

Thanks for your help in advance.

[bow-wow]

Originally posted by texasag
Having administered only single Linux hard drive servers, how do you merge the two drives together so that you can use the entire contents of both for your potential clients' websites. You could implement RAID-something spanning both drives. This is a non-trivial setup, especially for a remote system that already has the OS installed on the master drive.

Much more basic/simple, but less flexible, would be to divide your sites or users into two groups and serve one group on the primary drive and the other group on the secondary drive. ex: you could mount a partition on your second drive as /home2 or something.

[texasag]

Can you specify multiple locations to use for customers' sites through CPanel. I initially set it up as /home but I'm not sure if there's capability to do /home and /home2 as mentioned.

Please advise CPanel/Linux gurus.

[texasag]

just bumping this thread up... Any Linux gurus out there?

[QT]

cPanel can support multiple home directories. If you mount the 2nd hard drive as /home2 you can specify a mask for home directories in the cPanel configuration so it will use /home, /home2, etc.

[texasag]

ok, I've mounted the second hard drive through CPanel and formatted it with EXT3 file structure. I don't see the mask option to allow both /home and /home2 to be used for new accounts.

Am I missing something simple? Thanks for your help QT.

Edited below:

Is this where I configure this? (see below)

*****************************************
Default Home Directory:
Enter the location where you desire to have new user's home directories created. By default, it will select the disk or partition with the least usage.

Examples: /home, /home2, /newhome
*****************************************

Can I enter "/home, /home2" and it will use both of them?

Thanks again...

[QT]

Home Directory Prefix:" in "Edit Setup", it should be just "home". cPanel will create accounts in whatever home* directory has the most free space.

There are a couple of good threads on this in the cPanel forums if you want to take a look at them (simply do a search on 'home directories').

:)

[texasag]

Well there wasn't any threads that were useful searching for "home directories" as mentioned. However, I think your help has been sufficient.

So leaving default home directory to: /home

and home directory prefix to: home

should use both /home and /home2 at the same time, whichever is most free (capacity-wise) at the time

Am I right?

Thanks for your help!

[QT]

Originally posted by texasag
Am I right?

Yes, you are correct. :)

[rp8774]

Hi,

Just wondering if there's a way to do this using Plesk.

Thanks

[heartburn]

I think I'm going to use my second drive to install Gentoo.

[heartburn]

oops. I posted that to the wrong thread. sorry. :eek7:

[RMBP]

I too have the same settings on WHM.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 74G 18G 53G 25% /
/dev/hda1 99M 9.0M 85M 10% /boot
none 502M 0 502M 0% /dev/shm

If I go to format/mount a new harddrive under disk drives, my option is to format "the Found Disk: hdc". Is this the correct one to format, mount and partition?

Thanks