From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 20 16:46: 4 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from camelot.bitart.com (BITart-45.BITart.com [206.103.221.45]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0D58837B514 for ; Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:46:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from gerti@bitart.com) Received: (qmail 23225 invoked by uid 101); 20 Apr 2000 23:46:05 -0000 Message-ID: <20000420234605.23224.qmail@camelot.bitart.com> Content-Type: text/plain MIME-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 4.2mach v148) In-Reply-To: <38FF9375.3EA61E0C@101freeway.com> X-Nextstep-Mailer: Mail 4.2mach (Enhance 2.2p1) Received: by NeXT.Mailer (1.148) From: Gerd Knops Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 18:46:04 -0500 To: Hampton Maxwell Subject: Re: Vinum on root partition Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Reply-To: gerti-freebsdq@BITart.com References: <38FF9375.3EA61E0C@101freeway.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hampton Maxwell wrote: > Is it possible to have a vinum mirrored volume as the root > partition on a 4.0-STABLE machine? I browsed the man pages and list > archives which seemed to suggest support would be added later but > no confirmation of whether it was in or how to implement it. > If not, anyone have suggestions on the best way to get fault > tolerance in the case that the drive with the root partition goes > down. > I administer a number of remote machines, all of which are accessible by 'non experts'. I use this schema: 2 identical disks, with 3 partitions each: /, /usr and /home. The /home partition is a vinum partition. The / and /usr partitions I copy over 'manually' (using pax, which is quite fast) whenever a change is made to them. If the primary drive goes down, the 'remote people' just need to swap the drives, (I mount them in mobile racks), if the secondary drive goes down there is no downtime at all. One BIG advantage of this setup: I can run remote 'make buildworld/installworld' sessions, and if something goes wrong, I can just have the 'remote' people swap the drives and start over. Not a perfect solution for everyone, but works great for me. Gerd To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message