[ILUG] Production system - Linux 2.4.24, LVM and cciss

[Dale Gallagher]

Hi

Ok, based on my previous post re: running 2.6 on a production system,
and some (brief) research since then, I came to the following temporary
conclusion, with comments.  I'd greatly appreciate feedback on this.  I
know this post covers many topics, so I'll try to split it later,
depending on the nature of the responses.

System:

HP Proliant DL380 Pentium Xeon 3.06GHz/533MHz/1M
1GB Memory (will add as necessary)
SmartArray 6402/128MB
4x 72GB SCSI disks in RAID 1+0
2x 146GB SCSI disks for rotating backups

Software:

Slackware 9.1, Linux 2.4.x, qmail, PostgreSQL, Apache

Major considerations are:

1.  Multifunction system requiring max performance

As everything will run (for now) on a single system, require max
possible IO, reliability, performance, yada-yada... particularly since
using qmail with Maildirs. So, using RAID 1+0 and possibly LVM?

2.  Smart Array 6402

Requires cciss driver - http://sourceforge.net/projects/cciss/
Current status for 2.4.23, but would like to run 2.4.24 for the
following security advisory.  ccis also forces me to stick with
Linux 2.4.x, as there isn't a release available for 2.6.x yet. Any
foreseen issues in using ccis_2.4.23 with the 2.4.24 kernel?

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/slackware_advisory-3926.html

3. LVM

Never used it, but know what a headache partition moving, symlinking etc
can cause, so need sound advice on LVM. This system will expand to using
external array storage at a later stage, amongst other things. I used
Compaq Proliant boxes a few years ago and remember them requiring a
special partition for Compaq's system utils etc - is this still the
case?  How would I deal with this in LVM? Similarly, this consideration
would also apply to my Dell laptop, which requires a partition for
suspend functionality.

Really need pointers here, as LVM-HOWTO docs seem rather general at
first glance - will continue my quest for more detailed info though.

Example:

Would I create /dev/blabla1 for HP system utils and
/dev/blabla2 for the rest (on RAID 1+0 array) on initial install and
then create a volume group from /dev/blabla2 for Linux when configuring
LVM?

Is is really viable to use LVM and a single underlying partition on the
disk array in terms of reliability/performance etc?

Thanks in advance.
Dale