Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 09:35:23 -0800 (PST) From: Dave Wells <wellsian@caffeine.com> To: "Kim J. Brand" <kim@simple-mail.com> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RAID 1 Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0002060914350.6961-100000@boris.netgate.net> In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.20000206072014.007291c0@192.168.0.1>
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Kim, Greg says fbsd4 will have support for DPT cards. (cheers!) I don't know what level of support is planned, but this may be the ticket. Other than that vinum certainly should do what you need at least for live redundancy. And while I've never configured any monitoring for vinum there are probably a few places you could hook-in to have email sent when a drive stops behaving normally. Greg or others will know more about this. Even then, and maybe before, you'll want some kind of off-system backup and a plan. This is very different but at least as necessary. I'm finally catching on to your question and it really sounds like a backup/recovery plan is more important than RAID. RAID can provide high availability, and a pseudo-backup with mirrors, but it doesn't do anything for you if there's a problem that erases your data. To recover from that you need off-system storage (tapes CDs or whatever is appropriate) and this should include multiple sets with rotated off-site storage. This is the kind of planning that saves you after truly catastrophic failures such as fires or vandalism or thefts or "acts of God". If you have a spare drive, an up-to-date boot/install image (say, CDRW), and nightly tapes, recovery is a cinch. It's a long topic in itself (though generally simpler than RAID) and I'm not sure if it's old news to you or not. And since it's my bedtime I'm going to let others take a crack for now. |) "night" Dave On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, Kim J. Brand wrote: > you've all been TOO kind to invest such thought and energy into this. > > my application doesn't require the sort of performance or 24/7 uptime that > i think is being contemplated by much of the RAID technology i've learned > about with your help. my application is a server in a cemetery office. (a > VERY LARGE cemetery.) the data is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL, but if access is > delayed by even a day, life won't end.) > > i believe i could produce an X-Y plot of availability and data security > requirements. at the upper right would be COMMERCIAL WEBSERVERS, at the > lower left would be personal computers used for AOL access, but there is a > distribution in the middle, and this customer just wants their data to BE > THERE and it's OK if they have to call the service tech to get it. in > fact, they implicitly make that choice by not spending the big bucks it > takes to have all the auto-fail-over, hot swap stuff. i think most offices > fall in this category of use. performance is NOT an issue, the alternative > to looking this stuff up on the computer is walking over to a 400 square > foot vault and finding one of 200K * 3 lot cards filed by name, location > and date of burial. > > it would be COOL to have some sort of alert or e-mail message sent to a > user that 'one drive failed and could you please get around to fix it'. > that's about as automated as i need. > > it looks like VINUM could do what i need for RAID-1. i read through greg's > stuff and am going to try to figure out how to make it work. any help > along those lines would be much appreciated. in particular: hardware > recommendations. would it be easier to wait for V4? > > thanks, > > kim To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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