Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 09:04:17 +1000 From: Tony Landells <ahl@austclear.com.au> To: "Kory Hamzeh" <kory@avatar.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: vinum question Message-ID: <200108272304.JAA23332@tungsten.austclear.com.au> In-Reply-To: Message from "Kory Hamzeh" <kory@avatar.com> of "Mon, 27 Aug 2001 12:58:17 MST." <005201c12f32$9d236f60$14ce21c7@avatar.com>
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kory@avatar.com said: > I've been reading up on vinum, but I can't tell if I can enable vinum > on a filesystem that is already configured with FBSD 4.3-RELEASE. For > example, my server is up and running right now with a /, /var, and / > usr filesystems all on the first physical drive. Can I now enable > vinum to use the second drive for RAID 1 mirroring? The answer is basically yes, but there are some caveats... You can mirror "/", because there is a chicken and egg situation in startup. Vinum needs to be started and to read its information from disk before any vinum partitions can be used. And vinum needs to store 265 blocks of configuration information at the start of each vinum "device". The "best" way to do this is have all the vinum managed space on a disk together so that you only need to "sacrifice" 265 blocks for the disk. So, if you have "/" on disk slice "a", swap on "b", "/var" and "/usr" on, say, "g" and "h" (basically somewhere on disk with no other disk space between them), then you can reduce swap by 265 blocks to make room for the vinum configuration without losing your existing data on "/var" and "/usr". Of course, if you don't have 265 blocks of swap to spare (try monitoring it for a while with "swapinfo" if you aren't sure), then things will get pretty ugly. If you search the archives there is a discussion around 24 January this year about how to do this. That discussion is actually called "installing onto vinum" but the idea is exactly the same. Cheers Tony -- Tony Landells <ahl@austclear.com.au> Senior Network Engineer Ph: +61 3 9677 9319 Australian Clearing Services Pty Ltd Fax: +61 3 9677 9355 Level 4, Rialto North Tower 525 Collins Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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