Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 10:35:49 +0100 From: Jorn Argelo <jorn@wcborstel.com> To: Felix 'buebo' Kakrow <buebo@buebo.de> Cc: FreeBSD-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: State of gvinum RAID-5 Message-ID: <455ED3F5.2020302@wcborstel.com> In-Reply-To: <20061115155418.R23325@familysquires.net> References: <20061110170729.5414df98@gwen.pulp-friction.local> <20061115155418.R23325@familysquires.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Michael L. Squires wrote: > > > On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Felix 'buebo' Kakrow wrote: > >> Hello List, >> I tried gvinum RAID-5 with a 5-Stable around the time when 5.1 or 5.2 >> was released (afair) and back then it basically sucked big time. Raid >> worked as long as nothing failed, but reconstructing a drive was >> somewhere between very painful and not possible. >> >> Now I will have to upgrade hardware soon, which means I could switch >> from NetBSD (and Raidframe) to FreeBSD (with gvinum) again. I would >> like to because NetBSD seems to have some kind of memory leak in >> connection with Samba and large or many files, but I'd rather have a >> somewhat unstable Samba than an unstable Raid, so what's the state of >> affairs? >> >> Cheers >> Felix > > I'm about to try; I have my home server stuck at 4.11 because I could > never get gvinum to work reliably with 5.x, and the drives I had wouldn't > work with two different hardware RAID controllers (ex EMC ST446xxx's, > a DPT/Adaptec controller and a LSI controller - apparently only certain > EMC BIOS versions will work, and I don't have them). > > I did find a posting by someone who installed gvinum/RAID5 recently > (under > 6.X) but there was nothing about stability. > > Mike Squires > UNIX(tm) at home > since 1986 > I'm running gvinum on a PowerEdge 2450 with an external Adaptec SCSI card connected to a PowerVault 712 (I think, at least an old one), also running RAID 5. This runs on FreeBSD 6.1. It was not that hard to set it up, as the handbook has well written documentation about it. However, there is one thing you should know: Never, ever, edit the gvinum config file directly when you want to remove drives from your array. Use the gvinum shell for that. Immediately removing them from the config file will cause kernel panics. In fact, only use the config file to define your array: Make changes via the shell. Maybe it sounds logic to you, but I had about 10 kernel panics before I figured that out. Overall if you follow exactly what's being said in the documentation it is quite okay, but my gvinum installation is still missing features. The Google Summer of Code project has invested quite a lot of time in fixing the missing features in gvinum, so overall I think it should be a fairly complete suite now. I'm not sure if those changes are already commited to the source tree, but I guess they are. My gvinum installation certainly is stable, however. And the server is fairly important, so I can't risk upgrading gvinum and maybe ruin the array. Jorn > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to > "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?455ED3F5.2020302>