RAID-1 sans disks

In preparation for a somewhat more dramatic future experiment, I’ve been trying out RAID-1 failure modes using linux’s loopback capabilities to avoid having to actually buy any more real hard drives. You can simulate drive failures, failover and easily see what the current disk contents are. It should go without saying that, if you have a real RAID system currently running, you probably don’t want to execute these commands without thinking a bit first:

# Creating and destroying disks from the safety of your own console
mkdir ~/raid; cd ~/raid

# Create two 10Mb files called disk0 and disk1
for d in 0 1; do dd if=/dev/zero of=disk${d} bs=1024 count=10240; done

# Make them available as block devices using the loopback device
for d in 0 1; do sudo losetup /dev/loop$d disk$d; done

# Combine the two 'disks' into a RAID-1 mirrored block device
# Using '--build' rather than '--create' means there is no device
# specific metadata, and so the contents of the disks will be identical
sudo mdadm --build --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/loop[01]

# Create a filesystem on our raid device and mount it
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0 
mkdir /tmp/raidmnt
sudo mount /dev/md0 /tmp/raidmnt
sudo chown $USER /tmp/raidmnt

# The contents of both disks change in unison
md5sum disk[01]
date > /tmp/raidmnt/datefile
sync
md5sum disk[01]

# If we mark one disk as failed, disk contents diverge
sudo mdadm --fail /dev/md0 /dev/loop0
date > /tmp/raidmnt/datefile
sync
md5sum disk[01]

# Remove the failed disk and readd it, and RAID1 will sync
sudo mdadm --remove /dev/md0 /dev/loop0
sudo mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/loop0
sleep 1
md5sum disk[01]

# Add a third (unused) disk into the system to test failover
dd if=/dev/zero of=disk2 bs=1024 count=10240
sudo losetup /dev/loop2 disk2
sudo mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/loop2
sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0

# When one of original two disks fail, the new disk gets used
md5sum disk[012]
sudo mdadm --fail /dev/md0 /dev/loop0
date > /tmp/raidmnt/datefile
sync
md5sum disk[012]

# Tidy up the world
sudo umount /dev/md0
sudo mdadm -S /dev/md0
for x in /dev/loop[012]; do sudo losetup -d $x; done
rm -rf /tmp/raidmnt ~/raid