From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 15 23:14:45 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A96B516A4B3; Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:14:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from front3.mail.megapathdsl.net (front3.mail.megapathdsl.net [66.80.60.32]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E65943FDD; Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:14:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from aarong@megapathdsl.net) Received: from [64.32.182.44] (HELO megapathdsl.net) by front3.mail.megapathdsl.net (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.1.3) with ESMTP id 103880469; Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:14:44 -0700 Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:14:18 -0700 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v552) To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey From: aarong In-Reply-To: <20031015055546.GK13080@wantadilla.lemis.com> Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.552) cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: volumes crash on reboot [was Re: clearing Vinum configurations] X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 06:14:45 -0000 After some extensive testing, I've come to the conclusion that Vinum refuses to create any type of volume on the drive I'm having trouble with. I'll create any number of volumes and/or additional plexes on the second drive in the system successfully, only to have all the volumes or plexes that reside on the second drive crash on reboot. Vinum's logs in /var/log/vinum_history aren't very helpful nor are any of the other debugging techniques listed in the vinum debug howto. What I have not been able to find is a way to understand why Vinum declares a volume crashed or a plex faulty. I've initialized and reinitialized the second drive until I was blue in the face; creating filesystems and fsck'ing them; copying large amounts of to arbitrarily created slices all without incident. Only Vinum has a problem with the second drive, and only upon a reboot of the machine. I've had no issue adding plexes to existing volumes and mirroring them. /var/log/vinum_history is filled with "vinum started", "list", "dumpconfig", "start usr.p1", and "quit" messages - nothing descriptive of interest. The same goes for "vinum list" output, as well as dd'ing the sixth sector on both drives. This is a remote box without -DVINUMDEBUG built and such a procedure is far too prohibitive; it's already taken a week to find a competent tech at the datacenter to work with Vinum and another week to teach him how to setup a bootable Vinum volume. Needless to say we're far behind schedule. As much as I'd like to mirror things and leave it at that, it worries me greatly that something could be physically wrong with the second hard drive and this software RAID 1 setup is only giving my client a false sense of security. I'll need some sort of concrete evidence to ask for a new hard drive to be installed. The first drive, known to Vinum as "alpha", is ad0 and has four perfect volumes which the system runs off of. The second drive, known to Vinum as "beta", is the slave on the secondary channel and hence is device ad3. I'm almost sure this has no relevance but as you can tell I'm completely lost. Both are identical in model, revision, and size. Regards, -aarong