On 2011-06-17, Donald Reichert <silvershadow...@gmx.de> wrote: > I'm preparing a pair of new servers, each equipped with a bunch of > NICs in order to replace some Cisco gear doing BGP and friends. > > What puzzles me right now is how to configure the stuff HD-wise. I > have two SSDs in each of the machines, my initial planning was to do > some RAID-1 in order to push uptime. (I have to admit that as a former > Linux sceptic I have made excellent experience with their RAID stuff -- > thus my planning.) > > However, as the years went by and my NetBSD knowledge isn't the best > any more (hint: RAIDframe), I'm not sure how to set up my OpenBSD > routers. Is there any 'best practice guide' out there? FAQ is a bit > thin: > > http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#RAID > > So, after all I wanted to use softraid(4) and put everything except > root there, as, from what I read, OpenBSD cannot boot off a RAID > partition at the moment. Is that correct?
That's correct, so at present softraid(4) isn't going to help with uptime, and it's not going to help much with data protection on this type of system either (since most of what you care about will be config data which will be in / and should be in some kind of config management system anyway). It's quite common to just run routers from single disk/SSD (or CF, but if you're using a standard machine there's no point messing around with this now that 8/16GB SSDs are so cheap). Less uptime on the single box if a disk fails, but there are plenty of things that can fail in a machine, and that's why you install them in pairs...and of course this method reduces complexity, which is typically good for uptime :) But root-on-softraid might not be so far off; would any softraid developers like to weigh in and suggest how things might be configured so that it works for now and make it easier to move to root-on-raid in future? Personally I wouldn't bother with this for a router, but for some other applications it would be helpful to know.
