From owner-freebsd-geom@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Sep 21 16:42:27 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6234C16A4CE for ; Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:42:27 +0000 (GMT) Received: from kestrel.alerce.com (kestrel.alerce.com [209.182.219.40]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1CBFC43D58 for ; Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:42:27 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from hartzell@kestrel.alerce.com) Received: from satchel.alerce.com (0-d-60-f8-9f-4a.dhcp.lbl.gov [131.243.195.161]) (authenticated bits=128) by kestrel.alerce.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i8LGgPUQ058912 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=OK); Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:42:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from hartzell@kestrel.alerce.com) Received: from satchel.alerce.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by satchel.alerce.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id i8LGgplt003683 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=OK); Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:42:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from hartzell@satchel.alerce.com) Received: (from hartzell@localhost) by satchel.alerce.com (8.13.1/8.13.1/Submit) id i8LGgnrR003679; Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:42:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from hartzell) From: George Hartzell MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <16720.23049.587056.935674@satchel.alerce.com> Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:42:49 -0700 To: Paul Mather In-Reply-To: <1095741109.9448.84.camel@zappa.Chelsea-Ct.Org> References: <1095741109.9448.84.camel@zappa.Chelsea-Ct.Org> X-Mailer: VM 7.17 under 21.4 (patch 15) "Security Through Obscurity" XEmacs Lucid X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV version 'clamd / ClamAV version 0.65', clamav-milter version '0.60p' cc: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Fresh install onto geom_stripe or geom_mirror? X-BeenThere: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: hartzell@kestrel.alerce.com List-Id: GEOM-specific discussions and implementations List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:42:27 -0000 Paul Mather writes: > [...] The PC has two 80 GB drives fitted that I'd > like either to mirror or stripe together as one "drive" and then install > onto that. > > What is the best way to do that? > [...] I don't know whether my approach was "best" or not, but it seemed to work. I have a dual-bus scsi based system that can boot off of any drive I want. It has a matching pair of nice drives in the 1U case, and I wanted them to be identical copies. I ended up hanging an oddball external scsi drive off of the system, doing a minimal install onto that, booting the minimal install, running /stand/sysinstall and using it to partition and add boot blocks to both drives (w/ identical partition tables). Then I exited sysinstall and ran gmirror by hand to create a mirror (gm0s1) that consisted of da0s1 and da1s1. I bsdlabeled/partitioned it by hand, and then did a "dump ... | restore ..." for each partition from the external drive, the reset my bios to boot off of da0. I managed to expose a couple of problems which Pawel fixed, I think that some of the fixes have made it into the beta's and some are on their way. In particular, if you're going to swap onto the mirror, you need to give the system a chance to leave the swap partition in a nice state, otherwise the mirror appears to be dirty and get's resynched. Pawel touched up /etc/rc.d/{swap1,addswap}, and I had to retrain myself to use "shutdown -r now" instead of just "reboot" so that they'd have a chance to run. The second problem was more insidious, after updating to a newer BETA (3, I think) the system started insisting that one of the mirrors was dirty, no matter how I shutdown. Pawel figured out what was going on, and I tested a patch for it last night, which seems to work fine. Pawel's considering the aesthetics of the fix and will commit some version of it soon. g.