Setting up software RAID-5 on CentOS 6.5

Note: I’ve moved everything to a new server running CentOS 7 and everything works without any problems with the same instructions. The RAID-5 array works on the new server without any modifications.

The hard disk in my home server had a minor hick up recently reminding me of my sloppy backup policy. The error was big enough to force me to make some changes to the server so I decided to start from scratch. The server had previously had several jobs to do, it was a router/gateway, a dhcp server, a dns server and on top of that a virtual machine host running KVM. I had already moved all services other than the VM host to another devices so getting a clean start looked like a good idea. Continue reading