Network and System Management

Reading, Writing and no Arithmetic

Level 2: Step 1
NORMAL
Theme: Disconnected Systems: Disks and Storage
Due Date: 01/11/2023

Please take the following notes in consideration:

• In this assignment the questions marked with a (*) are practical and have to be shown to the
teacher (no report is needed).

• The remaining questions are to be answered in a written report, to be delivered to the teacher.

• Whenever possible, the VMs necessary to resolve the practical questions should be created as
linked clones.

Disks, Partitions & File Systems

1. What does the term partition alignment represent? Is it relevant when using an SSD
(Solid-State Drive) disk?

2. (*) Using a Windows VM with a GPT partition table, check if the partitions are aligned.
Justify the answer by demonstrating the appropriate commands.

3. (*) Using a Debian Linux VM, add a 2GB virtual disk and, in that disk, create an
MBR partition table and a properly aligned primary partition (for 4 KB blocks).
Prove, through the execution of adequate commands, that this partition table is of type
MBR and that it is aligned.

RAID & Volume Management

4. (*) Create a Debian Linux VM with 5 virtual disks of 100MB each plus the system
disk.
Describe the necessary steps to perform the following sequence of tasks in the command
line:
Include any commands used to install additional packages

(a) Using mdadm, organize the first 4 disks in a RAID 5 array with 3 active and 1
hot-spare. Name your device /dev/md0.
(b) Create an XFS file system in the array and make it available in /mnt/md0. Ensure
the volume is mounte at boot time.
(c) Confirm the layout of your array by inspecting the details of the /dev/md0 array.
(d) Add a 4th active disk to the array and re-dimension the file system you created in
/dev/md0.
(e) Use a combination of dd and /dev/random to generate the /mnt/md0/file.dat
file with 200MB in size.
Network and System Management

(f) Use mdadm to cause a failure in one of the active disks and remove it from the array.
(g) Confirm that one of the hot-spare disks took its place by inspecting the array’s
details.

Local Backups
5. (*) Create a Debian Linux VM with an extra 2 GB disk, with ext4 file system and make
it available in /mnt/sdb.
(a) Create the /home/gsr/Data directory and generate some test files on it.
(b) Demonstrate the use of the rsync command to perform mirroring (backup based
on a single synchronized copy) from /home/gsr/Data to /mnt/sdb/Backup;
(c) Demonstrate the use of the tar command to perform incremental backups from
/home/gsr/Data to /mnt/sdb/Backup.

Deliverables
6. All deliverables should be submitted using the /submit command:

1. PDF file with the report

2. Maximum: 2 students

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