eric wrote: > [ Note: I don't like doing this. I would rather use a snapshot and ] > [ just get -current, but I have the Adaptec bullshit on this machine ] > [ and need a kernel that support aac(4). ] > > I'm going from 3.6 to 3.7, and just trying to get the fscking adaptec > controller working.
[snip the start of a long and ugly process] Bah. too much like work. Just do this... Grab ANOTHER computer. Pentium 75, 32M RAM or better. IDE disk system. WHATEVER. Load that up with 3.7-release. Turn on softdeps. Install the system source code (/usr/src/sys). Build yourself a 3.7 kernel with that source on the 3.7 system, but with your aac driver in place. Even on a Pentium 75, should only take a few hours. Now..use that kernel instead of the GENERIC kernel to do a "remote install" on your problem machine as detailed in upgrade37.html. done! better idea: go get a standard SCSI adapter to plug your drives into if you can't afford a good RAID card. Granted, you lose RAID, but you will probably GAIN reliabilty. Remember: RAID isn't your goal. Reliability is. Running an unreliable RAID controller driver is probably worse than having non-RAIDed disks. I've been doing some stuff recently with two disks in a single machine to accomplish the goals of rapid repair (these are DNS resolvers and servers, very important, but also highly redundant by nature, so 100% uptime isn't an issue, but rapid repair is). I stuck a second disk in the machines. I use ALTROOT to duplicate the boot partition (including the /etc directory and its configs), and daily.local also dumps important information as well, and weekly, I dump/restore the rest of the partitions from wd0 to wd1. If I lose the boot drive, unplug the bad drive, and boot off the remaining one. Beats the heck out of most RAID systems I've seen for this application, and in fact, it provides a (lame) kind of backup, as if I manage to rm -r * from the wrong directory, I can still recover nicely. Nick.
