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Date:      Mon, 04 Jun 2001 04:08:48 -0400
From:      Sam Stern <samstern@samstern.net>
To:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Migration planning Hard drive configuration OpenBSD -> FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <5.1.0.14.2.20010604025031.02d597f0@mail.internal.samstern.net>

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Hi All,

At work, we use some FreeBSD servers and I really need to learn more about 
the day to day operations of FreeBSD. So I plan to migrate my home gateway 
and mail server to FreeBSD - Stable 4.3 from OpenBSD 2.8 (stable). However, 
there seems to be several "gotcha's" and area of planning needed. This 
email represents the Disk Subsystem issues that I think I need help with.

1) Currently, the system contains two IDE UDMA/33 Hard drives: System Files 
(5 GB) and Home files (10 GB). Here is the Partition Breakdown of the drives:

# df -hi
Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused   ifree  %iused  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a     991M    45M   897M     5%    3013  246073     1%   /
/dev/wd0d     484M   1.0K   460M     0%       1  121853     0%   /tmp
/dev/wd0e     1.9G   1.2G   683M    64%  141694  356480    28%   /usr
/dev/wd0f     991M   145M   797M    15%    1402  247684     1%   /var
/dev/wd1a     9.3G   3.1G   5.7G    35%  242922 23681812     1%   /home

A note regarding inodes: when originally formatted, /home experienced inode 
exhaustion because of the raw number of files in the main maildir.  Thus, 
the number of inodes was increased. clearly I added too many inodes that 
time :> But I was not going  to fix the issue as it would have taken a 
considerable amount of time to do so. That's doubly true now that my mail 
feed is live.

1a) System Drive. the swap is not active on this drive as I prefer not to 
use swap on the same channel as the live drive; it's there in the even of 
need.

--
fdisk: 1> p
Disk: wd0       geometry: 637/255/63 [10233405 sectors]
Offset: 0       Signatures: 0xAA55,0x0
          Starting        Ending
  #: id  cyl  hd sec -   cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  0: 00    0   0   1 -     0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
  1: 00    0   0   1 -     0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
  2: 00    0   0   1 -     0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
*3: A6    0   1   1 -   636 254  63 [        63 -   10233342] OpenBSD
--
# disklabel wd0
# using MBR partition 3: type A6 off 63 (0x3f) size 10233342 (0x9c25fe)
# /dev/rwd0c:
type: ESDI
disk: ESDI/IDE disk
label: Maxtor 85250D6
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 15
sectors/cylinder: 945
cylinders: 10856
total sectors: 10259160
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # microseconds
drivedata: 0

16 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
   a:  2096892       63    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.    0*- 2218)
   b:      500  2096955      swap                        # (Cyl. 2219 - 2219*)
   c: 10259160        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 10856*)
   d:  1023880  2097455    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl. 2219*- 3302)
   e:  4193910  3121335    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl. 3303 - 7740)
   f:  2096955  7315245    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl. 7741 - 9959)
   g:   846960  9412200    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl. 9960 - 10856*)

--

1b) /Home drive. I use maildir and email accounts for almost all storage, 
the numbers of inodes was increased at format time. Also, this is an old 
Windows Fat32 storage drive and thus has some odd partition issues that do 
not effect operations. Lastly, the swap partition is active on this drive 
as it's on a seperate channel and build occur off the first drive.

# fdisk wd1
Disk: wd1       geometry: 1023/255/63 [16434495 sectors]
Only LBA values are valid in ending cylinder for partition #0.
Offset: 0       Signatures: 0xAA55,0xE23A8B11
          Starting        Ending
  #: id  cyl  hd sec -   cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  0: 0F    1   0   1 -  1023 254  63 [     16065 -   26539380] Extended LBA
  1: 00    0   0   1 -     0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
  2: 00    0   0   1 -     0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
  3: 00    0   0   1 -     0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
Only LBA values are valid in ending cylinder for partition #0.
Offset: 16065   Signatures: 0xAA55,0x0
          Starting        Ending
  #: id  cyl  hd sec -   cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  0: 0B    1   1   1 -  1023 254  63 [     16128 -   26539317] Win95 FAT-32
  1: 00    1   0   1 -     0 254  63 [     16065 -          0] unused
  2: 00    1   0   1 -     0 254  63 [     16065 -          0] unused
  3: 00    1   0   1 -     0 254  63 [     16065 -          0] unused

--

# disklabel wd1
disklabel: warning, DOS partition table with no valid OpenBSD partition
# /dev/rwd1c:
type: ESDI
disk: ESDI/IDE disk
label: Maxtor 91360D8
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 16383
total sectors: 26563824
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # microseconds
drivedata: 0

16 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
   a: 25539696  1024128    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl. 1016 - 26352)
   b:  1024065       63      swap                        # (Cyl.    0*- 1015)
   c: 26563824        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 26352)

Okay so that leads to my questions:

A] For the First drive, how should I partition it so that my preferred 
breakdown of  (/ /var /usr /tmp) is maintained. Of Concern here is that 
FreeBSD is alleged to have a Cylinder 1024 boot issue. Should I add a /root 
slice to Drive #1 (adding it to drive #2 will impact IMAP performance) and 
resize / to be below cylinder 1024 (e.g. no more than 499MB in 
size)?  Also, are there any other issues of which I should be aware?
The plan is a fresh format of Drive 1 with important backups in a tar ball 
on backup media and drive 2

B] Drive #2 (wd1) contains my maildir for qmail and courier IMAP and I 
would prefer to leave that drive "as is" ( leave the file system as 
OpenBSD). So long as I am careful about the GID/UID in the new OS, will 
this work sans performance penalty (I do not use soft updates)? The Idea is 
to mount /home right from this drive if possible. While I can certainly 
reformat (and fix the Partition issues while I'm at it) if needed, that 
will increase migration time considerably as a bz2 file of the salient 
maildir + various configuration files is about 400MB (down from it's 
uncompressed ~1.3 GB).

C] Drive #2 has a currently non-fatal partition issue where there exits a 
Fat32 signature I could not remove without destroying the MBR (which I 
forgot to perform when I converted this drive to OpenBSD last year). Will 
FreeBSD be as forgiving as OpenBSD is about this slight Partition table issue?

thanks, in advance, for any help you can provide!


Sam Stern
Bethesda, MD, USA
mailto:samstern@samstern.net
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