Install kubuntu 24.04 LTS with Bootdrives as Raid1

[Tywyn]

Hi,

since this is my first posting a short introduction of myself. Located in Germany I use Linux since 1994 (Slackware was my first distribution) and I am quite happy with it.
Time has com to setup a new server and I wondered, how I can setup 2 harddrives in Raid 1 as bootdiscs for / and /boot/efi.
I searched a while in die manual partition-menu from the kubuntu installer, but I did not find anything about raid there.

Thanx, Rainer

[oshunluvr]

What kind of RAID?

Linux RAID via MDADM requires the kernel to load first so you would need to have a non-RAID /boot partition. If you have hardware (motherboard) based RAID it's probably possible but in my opinion not a good idea.

Installing to RAID is not a normal Kubuntu installation so I wouldn't expect to find much if anything about it in Kubuntu documentation. It seems, in theory at least, it's possible: https://superuser.com/questions/8221...oftware-raid-1

Seems like a ton of work just to have a redundant /boot partition. You could partition two drives identically and have duplicate copies of /boot/ and /boot/efi on them, then use the remaining space as RAID1 for the main / drive and /home.


Also, I'm not sure why Kubuntu is your first choice for server software. It's not really a server distro. I use Ubuntu Server (headless and no desktop environment) and have been for almost 10 years. I used Centos in a large scale enterprise environment as well, but it did have a couple desktop environments installed, mostly for on-site use.

[Tywyn]

oshunluvr, thank you for your answer.
I was thinking about a software-RAID, but following your explanation, it does not make so much sense.

I will go the way as you said to have duplicate /boot and /boot/efi32.

With my last server I indeed ran Ubuntu 18.04-22.04 LTS, but I also need a desktop environment, because I run some virtual machines on it (e.g. Win10). So I installed on ubuntu the kubuntu-desktop.
I thought, that taking kubuntu from scratch would be smarter, but maybe I will just install ubuntu 24.04 LTS with kubuntu-desktop again.
Any recommendation on this?

[oshunluvr]

As far a ubuntu with kubuntu-desktop added vs. straight kubuntu install: If you meant ubuntu server then yes that makes sense to me because you get the server software install options without any desktop, then add the DE later. If you install ubuntu (not server addition) and then add kubuntu desktop, you would have two DEs and not all the server-side tools.

Interesting that you use your server to run VM's. @here, my server computer is much less powerful than my desktop machine and VMs eat resources. I really only use the server to store media and backups and run Plex. I access it mostly through SSH and occasionally Webmin to see stats. However, I have to remind myself I'm old and have been messing with computers since the first became available to home users, and Linux nearly since it first went public. Drive space, RAM, and CPU cycles are a LOT cheaper than they used to be, LOL.

[Tywyn]

Yes, indeed hardware is powerful today and cheaper.
Usually I want to have only one computer running. This is why I use the linux computer also as a workstation