On Tuesday, 30 March 2004 at 0:32:38 -0300, Joo Carlos Mendes Lus wrote:Sorry for the cross-posting, but nor the Author nor freebsd-bugs did acknowledge my message, and I think this is a very serious bug in vinum, leading to loss of data...
If these are not the correct foruns for this, please forgive me and tell me which is the correct one.
PS: Please CC: me, since I'm not currently subscribed to these lists.
Sorry for the lack of response. Yes, I saw it, and so did Lukas Ertl, and we've been discussing it. This list is probably not the best.
==================================================== Hi Greg,
I've been a big fan of vinum since it's beggining. I use it for RAID0 and RAID1 solution for lots of servers.
In some RAID0 (stripe) configurations, though, I've had some serious problems. If an underlying disk fails, the respective plex and volume do not fail, as they should. This leads to full corruption of data, but worst of that, leads to a system which believes the data is safe. In one ocasion, for example, the backup ran and overwrote good data with bad data, full of zeros.
I am not fully aware of vinum programming details, but a quick look at 4.9-STABLE, in file vinumstate.c, dated Jul, 7, 2000, at line 588, function update_volume_state() sets volume state to up if plex state is corrupt or better for at least one plex:
for (plexno = 0; plexno < vol->plexes; plexno++) { struct plex *plex = &PLEX[vol->plex[plexno]]; /* point to the plex */ if (plex->state >= plex_corrupt) { /* something accessible, */ vol->state = volume_up; break; } }
I think this should be like:
if (plex->state > plex_corrupt) { /* something accessible, */
Basically, this is a feature and not a bug. A plex that is corrupt is still partially accessible, so we should allow access to it. If you have two striped plexes both striped between two disks, with the same stripe size, and one plex starts on the first drive, and the other on the second, and one drive dies, then each plex will lose half of its data, every second stripe. But the volume will be completely accessible.
A good idea if you have both stripe and mirror, to avoid discarding the whole disk. But, IMHO, if some part of the disk is inacessible, the volume should go down, and IFF the operator wants to try recovery, should use the setstate command. This is the safe state.
Note that when a hardware error occurs, it may be temporary. I have already seen lots of sector reading or writing errors that happen only once in the whole server life. But in vinum, a single read or write error is enough to change the subdisk state, and it will never come back without operator intervention.
If it's not easy to map if an equivalent subdisk is available, could at least be an option to choose which behaviour is expected?
I think that the real issue here is that Vinum should have returned an I/O error for accesses to the defective parts. How did you perform the backup?
Simply "rsync -aHSx --delete ..." from another machine every 6 hours. Note that I do not use the "--ignore-errors" option. I expected that if the master machine crash, the slave would have a full snapshot with at most 6 hour lost work.
When this problem happened, there was a backup run just before I could notice, and most files have been overwritten with zeroes or deleted. I also have tgz snapshots, but Murphy rules that this kind of problem will happen at the latest possible date before the snapshot.
By the way: This discussion remembers me that some vinum operations panic the server if done in multiuser mode. Is this known to you? I could not fully reproduce it yet, but if the server is important, I do not dare executing vinum commands in multiuser mode anymore. This means that I must be in console, and not over the network to configure or change some vinum configuration, reducing my telecommuting options. ;-)
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