hello;

I am new to linux, I support several linux rh 9.0 systems.

I have a couple of questions:
1) how do you find out the number of disks on your system and their size
with hpux you can do 'ioscan' to find that out, is there a smiliar
command for redhat

2) how do you determine kind of RAID is being used: hardware or software
and what RAID level it is at. On one of my rh 9.0 systems which is an
HP LH6000, the users say it has hardware raid. How do I confirm that.
There is not /etc/raidtab file and when you do a 'df' the mountpoints
are as follows:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 7582024 7123484 73384 99% /
/dev/sda1 124427 44492 73511 38% /boot
/dev/sdb1 35001508 8665408 24558108 27% /home
none 1161468 0 1161468 0% /dev/shm


thanks much

There are multiple ways to examine your system. Take a look at e.g. the output of cat /proc/diskstats and cat /proc/devices or read through dmesg to see what hardware is found at boot-time. Or dive into /proc/scsi or /proc/ide where your devices appear.

Hardware RAID is not visible at the software level as multiple hardware devices appear as a single one. Access to the individual hardware devices is shielded by the RAID hardware. On the contrary, you would access software RAID via a special device file, /dev/mdX (where X is a number) and would see information about it in e.g. cat /proc/mdstat and would still see the individual drives, too. With Red Hat Linux, you would also see loaded software RAID kernel modules when running /sbin/lsmod.

So much for the beginning.