10TB filesystem possible on Red Hat 4 EL System?

[Sam Flory]

Jack Murgia wrote:
> A new PE 2950 / MD1000 system was ordered by purchasing with Red Hat 4
> preinstalled. We have run all updates and attempted to create a 10tb array
> with no success.
> 
> One of our principals here is determined to put a 10TB ext3 filesystem on
> this array. 
> 
> Using fdisk will only create a 2TB partition, so I created a partition with
> parted instead, but we can't put an ext3 filesystem onto it. Thought I would
> try xfs, but RHN doesn't offer an xfsprogs package.
> 
> Do we need to move to RH or CentOS 5 in order to have a 10TB array?

  CentOS 5 x86_64 will make things a whole lot easier.  You can then
either install the xfs module, or the kernel with the xfsprogs rpm from
the Centos extras tree.  Why Red Hat has made all their customers suffer
I'm really not sure.


  Ext3 can in theory work on a 10TB file system, but I've yet to meet
people who are very happy with the results over a TB, or 2.  (Well yes
there are some ext3 developers....) What is going wrong with your setup?
 You are using GPT, and a 4K block size so it should in theory just take
an insane amount of time to create the filesystem.  (A really really
really long time.) Did you try rebooting between creation of the
partition table, and trying to mke2fs?  (Sometimes the kernel refuses to
update the partition table.)

PS- If you bought a copy of RHEL you can download RHEL 5 off th RHN.
Also you are entitled to ask RH for installation support.