Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 22:07:05 +0100 (MET) From: "\"Ulrich_Gruenebaum\"" <grueneba@luzi.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de> To: freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Vinum setup questions Message-ID: <200011072107.WAA21311@luzi.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de>
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Hi,
I am just setting up a 16GB mirrored volume
(RAID-1) with vinum on FreeBSD 4.1.1 using two
16GB harddisks. Vinum is great and I think I got
it to work after all, but I have still some
questions remaining. Any comments are appreciated.
By the way, is there a way to get vinum's own
version number out of vinum? This would be helpful
for reference purposes as in this text.
I find the vinum man pages quite clear and
helpful, but I was unsure about how to prepare the
new disks, i.e. what to do exactly *before*
putting them into the vinum configuration with
"vinum create", and what exactly to do
*afterwards* (when vinum finally provides them as
a single volume). There was not much help on this
topic from the vinum manpages; is there any
further documentation on this topic available
(except, of course, the manpages dedicated for
"disklabel" and "newfs", which do not cover
aspects of application order)?
To set up the mirrored volume, I tried the
following, based on the "mirror" example from
vinum(8). The two 16GB disks are /dev/da1 and
/dev/da2. Can anyone tell me, whether what I did
is halfways reasonable (for my config file, see
below)?
1. disklabel -w -r da1 auto
disklabel -w -r da2 auto
(to get the new disks labeled initially)
2. disklabel -e <disk1>
disklabel -e <disk2>
(to manually create a vinum partition on both
disks, see below for "disklabel" output)
3. vinum: create -v <configfile>
init -v -w mirror.p0
init -v -w mirror.p1
start mirror
start mirror.p1.s0
4. newfs -v /dev/vinum/mirror
(to put a filesystem on the volume)
Doing so, the following problems occured (any
comments appreciated):
In step 3: Before "start mirror.p1.s0" (starting
the subdisk of the second plex explicitly), the
first of the plexes was in state "up" (as should
be), but the second was shown as "faulty", which
I had not expected (see vinum(4): "faulty: a
plex which has gone completely down because of
I/O errors"); vinum(8) (section GOTCHAS) says,
the state of all newly-created plexes except the
first would be "stale". Nevertheless, following
the "start mirror.p1.s0" command, the subdisk
was revived and afterwards showed state "up" as
wanted.
In step 4: vinum(8) and vinum(4) tell to run
"newfs" on the *raw* volume device,
e.g. "/dev/vinum/rmirror". There was no such
device in my case, nor could I find any
directory named "/dev/rvinum" (as in the example
directory listing in vinum(4), section OBJECT
NAMING), instead the only device I found was
"/dev/vinum/mirror". I tried a "newfs" command
on it and it seems to work. Nevertheless, I
don't know what happend exactly doing so and I
don't feel very well with this. It would be
helpful if vinum itself could list the created
volume device name(s) with the "list" command.
The vinum configuration file I used:
# vinum config file
drive d1 device /dev/da1a
drive d2 device /dev/da2a
volume mirror
plex org concat
sd length 0 drive d1
plex org concat
sd length 0 drive d2
Output of "disklabel da1" command (same for da2):
# /dev/da1c:
type: SCSI
disk: QUANTUM
<--snip-->
8 partitions:
# size offs. fstype ...
a: 35861388 0 vinum # (Cyl. 0-17510*)
c: 35861388 0 unused # (Cyl. 0-17510*)
Some suggested man page improvements:
- I didn't find a notice, what the device names of
the volumes are, which I just created, i.e. on
which device I had to run "newfs" and which to
mount finally. It seems that for the mirror
example a device "/dev/vinum/mirror" was
created. This could be explained in more detail
and the device names perhaps be listed in
section FILES in vinum(8).
- The default location for the vinum logfile
(vinum(8), section "LOG FILE") seems to be
/var/log/vinum_history, not /var/tmp/... . The
logfile should also be mentioned in vinum(8),
section FILES.
- A small subsection and an example in vinum(8)
regarding how and in which order to initialize new
disks before they can be used from vinum
(i.e. "disklabel" command) would be nice; and also
an example of what to do until the new vinum
volume can be mounted anywhere ("newfs" command).
This could be inserted in vinum(8) in section HOW
TO SET UP VINUM. In my case, I've already
installed some hundreds of gigabytes of diskspace
on Solaris, Linux and Windows systems, but the
procedure for each system differs more or less
completely from the others concerning the tools to
use and the order in which to use them, therefore
I had appreciated some information on this in the
vinum context.
Thanks a lot for your answers!
Cheers
Ulrich
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ulrich Gruenebaum
grueneba@luzi.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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