On Saturday 15 March 2003 16:28, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Saturday, 15 March 2003 at 16:23:03 +1030, Malcolm Kay wrote: > > I am planning to put up a FreeBSD system, probably 4.8-RELEASE > > when it appears, to manage backups from a number of Unix and unix-like > > systems on a LAN. > > > > Backups will be written nightly over the LAN to a local disk system and > > transfered regularly to tape via a scsi tape-drive. > > > > I am under pressure to make this system fairly reliable with respect > > to hardware failure - particularly disk drives. The thought is to use a > > couple of fairly large drives, say 120 or 160Gb running as a mirrored > > pair using vinum. Having no experience with vinum or software RAID > > systems a number of questions come to mind: > > > > 1) All the examples appear to use scsi drives; but I assume EIDE are also > > usable? IDE seems to be pretty good these days and much cheaper than > > scsi. > > Yes, correct. Note that you shouldn't have more than one disk per > controller unless both use tagged queueing.
I'm not sure (== don't know) what tagged queueing is; but if for no other reason than performance I'd have placed the drives on different IDE ports. > > > 2)To what extent can the system be fully mirrored? Without RAID hardware > > it seems to me that a conventional disk partition outside the mirrored > > volume is probably necessary for mounting / ; is this true? > > Not completely. Check the latest man pages. 4.8 will be able to > handle root file systems on Vinum, though the manner in which it's > done is not the same as it is for release 5 and later. I seem not to have access to the latest man page vinum(8). At the moment I'm running 4.7-STABLE and all I can find on www.FreeBSD.org under either 4.7-stable or 5.0-RELEASE is marked FreeBSD 4.7 December 20, 2000, which I assume is not the latest you are refering to. Hopefully this will improve when I actually get hosd of 4.8-RELEASE. > > > 3)If the regular partition is necessary can this be taken as a modest > > slice from one of the disks whose major part is devoted to the mirror > > volume, and perhaps the corresponding slice on the other used for swap? > > Yes, this would be a possibility, but it's not necessary. Good! > > > 4)If the converse is true that the entire system can reside inside the > > mirrored volume then do I need a temporary additional disk to build the > > system? In any case it seems that an outside region or separate physical > > disk would be better for swap. > > No, there's a trick there. I'm attaching the relevant text from > upcoming fourth edition of "The Complete FreeBSD". This relates to > release 5, but the only difference is what you put in /etc/rc.conf and > /boot/loader.conf, and that's in the man page. Let me know if > anything's confusing. Appears to answer my questions but have not yet had time to fully comprehend. > > Greg Thanks, It seems it will end up better than I had expected. Malcolm To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
