From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Mar 30 18:44:39 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from razorfish.com (bowl.razorfish.com [206.64.109.59]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FFD737B9AB for ; Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:44:31 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mohan@razorfish.com) Received: from 18arhans.razorfish.com (18arhans.razorfish.com [206.64.109.60]) by razorfish.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id VAA08803 for ; Thu, 30 Mar 2000 21:44:19 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost (mohan@localhost) by 18arhans.razorfish.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id VAA08561 for ; Thu, 30 Mar 2000 21:44:18 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: 18arhans.razorfish.com: mohan owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 21:44:18 -0500 (EST) From: Mohan Khurana To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Mission Critical FreeBSD System Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Dear questions, One of my current projects involves building a mission critical FreeBSD box. Part of my definition of mission critical means that I must take into account any and all places where the box might fail and account for that possible point of failure. The box has already been built up by one of my coworkers. The box has two SCSI equally sized hard disks installed in it, as well as a controller that can do hardware level RAID 1 (mirroring, I believe). Here is the information from dmesg about our DPT controller: dpt0: rev 0x02 int a irq 7 on pci0.16.0 dpt0: DPT PM3224A FW Rev. 07G0, 1 channel, 64 CCBs Information about the drives: da0 at dpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0 da0: Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device da0: Tagged Queueing Enabled da0: 4340MB (8888923 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 553C) da1 at dpt0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0 da1: Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device da1: Tagged Queueing Enabled da1: 4340MB (8888412 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 553C) Here is where things get sticky: My coworker did not enable hardware level RAID 1 BEFORE the install. The configuration utility for DPT (it's a DOS based program), doesn't seem to allow for a new RAID device to be created and then syncing all of the data from the first drive onto the second drive. It only has an option to wipe the current contents of the drives and create a new RAID device that can be accesses from an OS that is to be freshly installed. So now I am faced with a problem: I some how need to get some sort of disk redundancy going on this machine. When I say redundancy, I mean the whole disk, including the kernel. At this point it makes no difference if the redundancy is performed via software or with hardware. One big problem with vinum is that it seems to load itself after the kernel has booted, which is a big problem. The solutions to this problem with vinum do not seem to be very clean, easy, or safe to implement. So I am now confused and asking you all, questions@freebsd.org, for advice, based on the given hardware, on what to do to get disk redundancy on this machine. Thanks much, mohan | || ||| || r a z o r f i s h , new york mohan khurana [ i.t. consultant, cts ] >> fax +1.212.966.6915 >> http://fish.razorfish.com/mohan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message