Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 16:48:41 -0600 From: Kevin Kinsey <kdk@daleco.biz> To: Huy Ton That <huyslogic@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Ian Lord <mailing-lists@msdi.ca> Subject: Re: Fileserver with FBSD? Message-ID: <4408C7C9.9010503@daleco.biz> In-Reply-To: <1cac28080603031340h2e8e9aemefdfc40a96a2dde6@mail.gmail.com> References: <1cac28080603031300t4eda925o92f0da43fa0e8d8a@mail.gmail.com> <6.0.0.22.2.20060303151658.027a04f8@mail.computinginnovations.com> <7.0.0.16.2.20060303162836.05607778@msdi.ca> <1cac28080603031340h2e8e9aemefdfc40a96a2dde6@mail.gmail.com>
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On 3/3/06, Ian Lord <mailing-lists@msdi.ca> wrote: >>>>that will span over the 4 drives? Sort of like a clustered space? >>>> >>>> >>>> >>I guess you mean you want to "merge" all hard drive space is if it >>was a single hd... >> >>In this case, you can either mount all the drives in your shared >>directory, or if you really want a single virtual hard drive, you can >>use raid 0, raid 5 or a span. You can either have a hardware raid >>controller or a software solution... >> >> Huy Ton That wrote: > Thanks all, I was looking for the merge solution; I appreciate your > feedback :) For your further information*: FreeBSD has a built in "Logical Volume Manager" to handle this sort of thing. It was originally written by Greg Lehey and known as vinum(4), and, since version 5 of FreeBSD and the introduction of GEOM and UFS2, has been rewritten by Lukas Ertl as gvinum(8). Looking at this can be a little daunting; most of the documentation (which includes a chapter in the FreeBSD handbook, a article, "Bootstrapping Vinum" by Robert Van Valzah, the manpages noted above, and much more about vinum at www.vinumvm.org) was written specifically for vinum(4), and gvinum(8) implements a slightly smaller set of commands, so when you are "RTFM", you're not always quite sure what applies and what doesn't. Also, Greg is an avid (if that is the correct term) writer, and his documentation is very detailed. In short, you can make your head spin trying to do your homework in advance, unless you really thrive on that sort of thing (and apparently I don't, not anymore, at least). If you can afford to, IMO the best way to learn gvinum is to get together a spare machine and hard disks and RTFM whilst you attempt to get gvinum up and running. Personally, I "read up" on vinum/gvinum for a long, long time and never thought I understood it, but once I actually gave it a go, I had it up and running > 500GB RAID5 over three drives in a rather short evening's work. YMMV, of course. Kevin Kinsey* *Mr. Kinsey is not a vinum/gvinum expert, nor does he play one on television. Any further reference to television is purely the random act of `fortune -s` (but does seem rather timely....) -- Television is a medium because anything well done is rare. -- attributed to both Fred Allen and Ernie Kovacs
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