On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 11:09:39PM -0500, J Moore wrote:
> I want to set up an OBSD box as a file server for some Windoze boxes. I
> think a RAID 1 setup will provide sufficient reliability - and it
> appears to be the cheapest way to go.
>
> I don't desire to become an expert on RAID, I don't want to spend a lot
> of money, and I'm confused by what I've read on the subject. Here's how
> I'd like it to work:
>
> One of the disks craps out... an alarm goes off... I walk in with a new
> drive, and replace the failed one (hot-swap?)... beeping stops... no
> data is lost, system "heals" itself by taking care of the new drive...
> years pass, and life is good.
>
> Is this feasible - can I remain ignorant of the RAID details and jargon,
> and still benefit from it?
>
> Thanks,
> Jay
Having just had a - more or less - positive experience with my shiny new
(software) RAID-1 over two 'shiny' old, old 4 GB IDE disks I dug out of
somewhere on my 'shiny' 'new' PII machine, I can say a couple of things.
Note that this is just out of personal experience, this is the first
RAID I've ever built outside of testing with two loopback files on
Linux, and that I've read TFM a couple of times.
In my case, I sat down at the console. I tried to log in, and was
greeted by the kernel aborting transactions to the second IDE bus, and
very little happening. The system was unresponsive (not totally, but
quite annoyingly so) and wouldn't log me in, from what I could guess,
from not being able to update logs and wtmp.
I powered down, examined the disk, powered up, noticed the second IDE
interface was disabled according to dmesg, and was greeted by a flurry
of parity rebuild (which failed immediately, unsurprisingly) and fsck
messages. After some verification and rebuilding /var/run/ld.so.hints
(which, apparently, got hit a little too close by fsck), the machine was
back in business.
RAID is cool. However, having some technical knowledge is always
required. I don't find it overly complex - if you can get to -stable,
you can get a (software, never had the chance to tinker with hardware)
RAID working.
And backups are very, very useful. Even if only because RAID makes you
feel slightly too confident, which isn't justified when newfs'ing the
wrong partition.
(For those interested, the above was set up as a testing box, built out
of mostly untrusted components; it managed to compile -stable and a
couple of ports, twice, so memory &c seem to be good - but one disk
didn't want to work at all, and a second died as described above. Two
down, two to go... I'll look at replacement parts.
And yes, I newfs'ed the wrong partition. It was late, I knew there was
nothing important on the box, and I was pretty confident in the RAID.
After newfs'ing /, it was time for a reinstall...)
Joachim
