Re: gmirror on 7B4
Quoting Clifton Royston [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 08:47:43AM -0800, Chris H. wrote: Quoting John Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I'm not sure I remember everything from earlier in this thread so I don't know if it's relevant, BUT you can't boot from a gstripe volume (or from a gconcat one AFAIK). Inferring from your fstab example below it doesn't sound like you intend to but I just wanted to be sure. Are you sure? I read that using gmirror requires /kernel to be located in the /boot slice and everything else (all other slices) can be mirrored safely. But in all my reading (man pages, FBSD handbook, asstd articles) I haven't seen anything indicating booting wasn't possible from a gstripe volume. Your current idea is backwards; you can boot from entirely mirrored drives (i.e. RAID1) and I've been doing it since 5.3, but AFAIK it is impossible to boot from a striped drive and I suspect will remain so for a long time. One way to visualize this is to recognize that because the gmirror information is stored at the very end of the lower-level GEOM object, each of the raw drives in the mirrored set appears to be an perfectly normal drive when reading it from its beginning; thus it is possible to simply read it as a normal device during the earlier stages of boot until GEOM and gmirror loads. With striping, however, the logical content is spread out across multiple drives, so any one drive you try to boot from has only 1/Nth of the relevant sectors. Indeed, and thank you for pointing out the obvious to me. :) I was almost immediately reminded of that after posting. :P But really, I appreciate your taking the time to /enlighten/ me. It /does/ help. Given the /wealth/ of information afforded to me here on the list, after proposing my intentions. It quickly occurred to me that I had developed quite a few misconceptions about GEOM and friends, and that I should have taken just a bit more time before leaping. In the final analysis, I think it would be /far/ more efficient if I simply blanked my current disk, and simply laid it out as I ultimately want it. Then simply unarc the root folders to their desired destinations from the most recent backups. Which kind of makes this thread a loop. As my initial question was why wasn't gMIRROR part of sysinstall. It's funny, I've spent over 2 decades running *BSD, and yet I never really spent much time obtaining intimate knowledge about the disk construction. Oh, it's not that I know nothing about it. But rather, that once I determined the ultimate layout for my needs, I simply let sysinstall handle it. So other than needing to add disks and move/ re-create slices, I was done. But as I now revisit it, I discover I should probably spend a little more time acquainting myself with it. :) Thanks again for taking the time to respond. I appreciate it. Chris Does this help? -- Clifton -- Clifton Royston -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] President - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/ Custom programming, network design, systems and network consulting services ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 08:47:43AM -0800, Chris H. wrote: Quoting John Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I'm not sure I remember everything from earlier in this thread so I don't know if it's relevant, BUT you can't boot from a gstripe volume (or from a gconcat one AFAIK). Inferring from your fstab example below it doesn't sound like you intend to but I just wanted to be sure. Are you sure? I read that using gmirror requires /kernel to be located in the /boot slice and everything else (all other slices) can be mirrored safely. But in all my reading (man pages, FBSD handbook, asstd articles) I haven't seen anything indicating booting wasn't possible from a gstripe volume. Your current idea is backwards; you can boot from entirely mirrored drives (i.e. RAID1) and I've been doing it since 5.3, but AFAIK it is impossible to boot from a striped drive and I suspect will remain so for a long time. One way to visualize this is to recognize that because the gmirror information is stored at the very end of the lower-level GEOM object, each of the raw drives in the mirrored set appears to be an perfectly normal drive when reading it from its beginning; thus it is possible to simply read it as a normal device during the earlier stages of boot until GEOM and gmirror loads. With striping, however, the logical content is spread out across multiple drives, so any one drive you try to boot from has only 1/Nth of the relevant sectors. Does this help? -- Clifton -- Clifton Royston -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] President - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/ Custom programming, network design, systems and network consulting services ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 Chris H. wrote: Where is the option to create, and install to a gMIRRORED drive-set? If not, why? If not, it possible to install to one drive, mirror all available drives with the data on the installed drive? sysinstall does not provide any simple method of setting up a gmirror RAID-1 itself, but it is fairly easy to escape from the installer and type in a few shell commands to set such a thing up. There are instructions here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html Yes, you can convert a drive with a plain vanilla install of FreeBSD on it into part of a gmirror setup easily and without having to worry about rebuilding filesystems. Cheers, Matthew - -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHe2Op8Mjk52CukIwRCHlZAJ4njIkbhvqNu1b/KmonuuFIfmr6WgCfet5g C25NHpDKIPfUYLFU6ay9T08= =jvLD -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
Hello, and thank you for your reply... Quoting Matthew Seaman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 Chris H. wrote: Where is the option to create, and install to a gMIRRORED drive-set? If not, why? If not, it possible to install to one drive, mirror all available drives with the data on the installed drive? sysinstall does not provide any simple method of setting up a gmirror RAID-1 itself, but it is fairly easy to escape from the installer and type in a few shell commands to set such a thing up. There are instructions here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html Hah! That's funny. I just picked up a copy of The Complete FreeBSD 4th edition the other day. But haven't had an opportunity to read it yet. Guess I'd better get to it. :) Yes, you can convert a drive with a plain vanilla install of FreeBSD on it into part of a gmirror setup easily and without having to worry about rebuilding filesystems. Seems so. But if you've got much data, and don't have a DVD, or tape magazine on it. You'll need to do the operation (likely) over NFS, and likely requiring a couple of re-boots. As I look at this (gmirror at sysinstall time) closer, it occurs to me that it wouldn't be very difficult to implement response script that asked questions for a basic gmirror setup that would encompass all drives available (seen/understood) and offered to create: swap / /boot /usr /var and simply asked how big the slices should be made. Just a thought. Thanks again for the response. Chris Cheers, Matthew - -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHe2Op8Mjk52CukIwRCHlZAJ4njIkbhvqNu1b/KmonuuFIfmr6WgCfet5g C25NHpDKIPfUYLFU6ay9T08= =jvLD -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hello, I seem to remember a similar question being asked in the past. But never ---8---snip---8--- I had originally intended to create a raid mirror on the whole lot of HD's during the install process. But I wasn't presented, nor could I find that option during install. So, due to lack of time, pushed it off till later, and simply installed onto the one HD. Now to my question(s)... Where is the option to create, and install to a gMIRRORED drive-set? ---8---snip---8--- 2) In my cases above, I'm interested in RAID-0 (mirroring for /volume/ not redundancy). OK, my mistake... Seems for my application (RAID0), *gstripe* is what I should be using. Q: But RAID0 provides 0 redundancy. How will you cope with data loss? A: Complete backups occur twice daily and I (we) use IP RAID0 - eg; 2 different servers have/provide the same data, and the DNS provides round-robin. Thereby spreading the requests roughly equal across both servers. So, given my new found knowledge. I felt I should probably ask before potentially clobbering (breaking) the server I'll be attempting this on. Will the following accomplish my goal? Current setup: /dev indicates the following: da0, da0c, da0cs1, da0s1, da0s1c da1, da1c, da1cs1, da1s1, da1s1c da2, da2c, da2cs1, da2s1, da2s1c ...and the following, which FreeBSD is installed on: da3, da3s1, da3s1a, da3s1b, da3s1c, da3s1d All drives are of same size/make/model. Given the above, I intend to issue the following: # gstripe label -v -s 131072 bigstripe \ /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 /dev/da3 # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe # echo 'geom_stripe_load=YES' /boot/loader.conf # echo '/dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe ufs rw 2 2' /etc/fstab Or do/should I issue: # gconcat label -v extradisks /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 # gstripe label -v bigstripe /dev/da3 /dev/concat/extradisks # bsdlabel -wB /dev/stripe/bigstripe # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe Thank you for all your time and consideration. Chris P.S. I know this is a bit noisy. I intend to keep it brief. Thank you for your understanding. :) -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
Quoting John Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I'm not sure I remember everything from earlier in this thread so I don't know if it's relevant, BUT you can't boot from a gstripe volume (or from a gconcat one AFAIK). Inferring from your fstab example below it doesn't sound like you intend to but I just wanted to be sure. Are you sure? I read that using gmirror requires /kernel to be located in the /boot slice and everything else (all other slices) can be mirrored safely. But in all my reading (man pages, FBSD handbook, asstd articles) I haven't seen anything indicating booting wasn't possible from a gstripe volume. For the record, FSTAB (on da3): /dev/da3s1b none (swap) /dev/da3s1a / /dev/da3s1d /var Thanks for your response. Chris Quoting John Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hello, I seem to remember a similar question being asked in the past. But never ---8---snip---8--- I had originally intended to create a raid mirror on the whole lot of HD's during the install process. But I wasn't presented, nor could I find that option during install. So, due to lack of time, pushed it off till later, and simply installed onto the one HD. Now to my question(s)... Where is the option to create, and install to a gMIRRORED drive-set? ---8---snip---8--- 2) In my cases above, I'm interested in RAID-0 (mirroring for /volume/ not redundancy). OK, my mistake... Seems for my application (RAID0), *gstripe* is what I should be using. Q: But RAID0 provides 0 redundancy. How will you cope with data loss? A: Complete backups occur twice daily and I (we) use IP RAID0 - eg; 2 different servers have/provide the same data, and the DNS provides round-robin. Thereby spreading the requests roughly equal across both servers. So, given my new found knowledge. I felt I should probably ask before potentially clobbering (breaking) the server I'll be attempting this on. Will the following accomplish my goal? Current setup: /dev indicates the following: da0, da0c, da0cs1, da0s1, da0s1c da1, da1c, da1cs1, da1s1, da1s1c da2, da2c, da2cs1, da2s1, da2s1c ...and the following, which FreeBSD is installed on: da3, da3s1, da3s1a, da3s1b, da3s1c, da3s1d All drives are of same size/make/model. Given the above, I intend to issue the following: # gstripe label -v -s 131072 bigstripe \ /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 /dev/da3 # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe # echo 'geom_stripe_load=YES' /boot/loader.conf # echo '/dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe ufs rw 2 2' /etc/fstab Yes, this should be fine (though you may need to do a gstripe load near the beginning). Or do/should I issue: # gconcat label -v extradisks /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 # gstripe label -v bigstripe /dev/da3 /dev/concat/extradisks # bsdlabel -wB /dev/stripe/bigstripe # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe No, assuming the disks are (roughly) the same size there's no reason to use gconcat, and in this case doing so will likely hurt performance in addition to adding complexity. gconcat is generally just for JBOD-type scenarios and it sounds like you're after RAID0 which is what gstripe is for. JN Thank you for all your time and consideration. Chris P.S. I know this is a bit noisy. I intend to keep it brief. Thank you for your understanding. :) -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hello, I seem to remember a similar question being asked in the past. But never ---8---snip---8--- I had originally intended to create a raid mirror on the whole lot of HD's during the install process. But I wasn't presented, nor could I find that option during install. So, due to lack of time, pushed it off till later, and simply installed onto the one HD. Now to my question(s)... Where is the option to create, and install to a gMIRRORED drive-set? ---8---snip---8--- 2) In my cases above, I'm interested in RAID-0 (mirroring for /volume/ not redundancy). OK, my mistake... Seems for my application (RAID0), *gstripe* is what I should be using. Q: But RAID0 provides 0 redundancy. How will you cope with data loss? A: Complete backups occur twice daily and I (we) use IP RAID0 - eg; 2 different servers have/provide the same data, and the DNS provides round-robin. Thereby spreading the requests roughly equal across both servers. So, given my new found knowledge. I felt I should probably ask before potentially clobbering (breaking) the server I'll be attempting this on. Will the following accomplish my goal? Current setup: /dev indicates the following: da0, da0c, da0cs1, da0s1, da0s1c da1, da1c, da1cs1, da1s1, da1s1c da2, da2c, da2cs1, da2s1, da2s1c ...and the following, which FreeBSD is installed on: da3, da3s1, da3s1a, da3s1b, da3s1c, da3s1d All drives are of same size/make/model. Given the above, I intend to issue the following: # gstripe label -v -s 131072 bigstripe \ /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 /dev/da3 # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe # echo 'geom_stripe_load=YES' /boot/loader.conf # echo '/dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe ufs rw 2 2' /etc/fstab Yes, this should be fine (though you may need to do a gstripe load near the beginning). Or do/should I issue: # gconcat label -v extradisks /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 # gstripe label -v bigstripe /dev/da3 /dev/concat/extradisks # bsdlabel -wB /dev/stripe/bigstripe # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe No, assuming the disks are (roughly) the same size there's no reason to use gconcat, and in this case doing so will likely hurt performance in addition to adding complexity. gconcat is generally just for JBOD-type scenarios and it sounds like you're after RAID0 which is what gstripe is for. JN Thank you for all your time and consideration. Chris P.S. I know this is a bit noisy. I intend to keep it brief. Thank you for your understanding. :) -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
I'm not sure I remember everything from earlier in this thread so I don't know if it's relevant, BUT you can't boot from a gstripe volume (or from a gconcat one AFAIK). Inferring from your fstab example below it doesn't sound like you intend to but I just wanted to be sure. Quoting John Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hello, I seem to remember a similar question being asked in the past. But never ---8---snip---8--- I had originally intended to create a raid mirror on the whole lot of HD's during the install process. But I wasn't presented, nor could I find that option during install. So, due to lack of time, pushed it off till later, and simply installed onto the one HD. Now to my question(s)... Where is the option to create, and install to a gMIRRORED drive-set? ---8---snip---8--- 2) In my cases above, I'm interested in RAID-0 (mirroring for /volume/ not redundancy). OK, my mistake... Seems for my application (RAID0), *gstripe* is what I should be using. Q: But RAID0 provides 0 redundancy. How will you cope with data loss? A: Complete backups occur twice daily and I (we) use IP RAID0 - eg; 2 different servers have/provide the same data, and the DNS provides round-robin. Thereby spreading the requests roughly equal across both servers. So, given my new found knowledge. I felt I should probably ask before potentially clobbering (breaking) the server I'll be attempting this on. Will the following accomplish my goal? Current setup: /dev indicates the following: da0, da0c, da0cs1, da0s1, da0s1c da1, da1c, da1cs1, da1s1, da1s1c da2, da2c, da2cs1, da2s1, da2s1c ...and the following, which FreeBSD is installed on: da3, da3s1, da3s1a, da3s1b, da3s1c, da3s1d All drives are of same size/make/model. Given the above, I intend to issue the following: # gstripe label -v -s 131072 bigstripe \ /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 /dev/da3 # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe # echo 'geom_stripe_load=YES' /boot/loader.conf # echo '/dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe ufs rw 2 2' /etc/fstab Yes, this should be fine (though you may need to do a gstripe load near the beginning). Or do/should I issue: # gconcat label -v extradisks /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 # gstripe label -v bigstripe /dev/da3 /dev/concat/extradisks # bsdlabel -wB /dev/stripe/bigstripe # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe No, assuming the disks are (roughly) the same size there's no reason to use gconcat, and in this case doing so will likely hurt performance in addition to adding complexity. gconcat is generally just for JBOD-type scenarios and it sounds like you're after RAID0 which is what gstripe is for. JN Thank you for all your time and consideration. Chris P.S. I know this is a bit noisy. I intend to keep it brief. Thank you for your understanding. :) -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- panic: kernel trap (ignored) ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gmirror on 7B4
Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting John Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I'm not sure I remember everything from earlier in this thread so I don't know if it's relevant, BUT you can't boot from a gstripe volume (or from a gconcat one AFAIK). Inferring from your fstab example below it doesn't sound like you intend to but I just wanted to be sure. Are you sure? I read that using gmirror requires /kernel to be located in the /boot slice and everything else (all other slices) can be mirrored safely. But in all my reading (man pages, FBSD handbook, asstd articles) I haven't seen anything indicating booting wasn't possible from a gstripe volume. Yes, I'm sure. In order to bootstrap the system, the BIOS needs to know how to read the operating system from the disk. FreeBSD's own loader also relies on BIOS calls for disk reads until the kernel is loaded and executed. When using a hardware RAID controller its own BIOS runs before the OS boot so it can handle disk I/O from the RAID volumes it knows about. When using purely software RAID such as gstripe, the computer knows nothing about any volumes, it just knows about the individual disks. If you tell it to boot from disk 1, it will try to boot from disk one and then choke since it will only get at most 1 stripe's worth of contiguous useful data (the next stripe being stored on a different disk). For gmirror this doesn't matter, since an individual disk can be used to load the kernel without any knowledge of RAID volumes. Nothing needs can write to the disk until init mounts the root partition read-write (presumably using gmirror) so the volume integrity is not affected. The simplest (IMO, although knowledge of fdisk, bsdlabel, newfs and what boot blocks go where may be required, along with using dump/restore on occasion) approach is to make / its own small partition on a gmirror volume and then create gstripe (or whatever) volumes from the remainder of the disks for the rest of the mountpoints. That means you'll be handing slices or partitions to gmirror, gstripe and friends rather than whole raw disks, but that's okay. It is possible to have only /boot on the actual boot device/partition (with the rest of / elsewhere) but in this scenario that just adds complexity. Most of the few hundred MB that / typically requires are in /boot anyway. If you want specific advice for a specific scenario you can probably get it, but you'll have to supply some additional details. For instance I'm still not sure if this is a new install or an upgrade (even after re-reading the entire thread), or if da3 is the same size as da0-2. Doing what you describe below will blow away the existing contents of da3 and the other disks, and/or won't be allowed if anything on da3 is currently mounted/running. Also you should stop saying mirror if you mean stripe or JBOD. :) JN For the record, FSTAB (on da3): /dev/da3s1b none (swap) /dev/da3s1a / /dev/da3s1d /var Thanks for your response. Chris Quoting John Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Chris H. [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hello, I seem to remember a similar question being asked in the past. But never ---8---snip---8--- I had originally intended to create a raid mirror on the whole lot of HD's during the install process. But I wasn't presented, nor could I find that option during install. So, due to lack of time, pushed it off till later, and simply installed onto the one HD. Now to my question(s)... Where is the option to create, and install to a gMIRRORED drive-set? ---8---snip---8--- 2) In my cases above, I'm interested in RAID-0 (mirroring for /volume/ not redundancy). OK, my mistake... Seems for my application (RAID0), *gstripe* is what I should be using. Q: But RAID0 provides 0 redundancy. How will you cope with data loss? A: Complete backups occur twice daily and I (we) use IP RAID0 - eg; 2 different servers have/provide the same data, and the DNS provides round-robin. Thereby spreading the requests roughly equal across both servers. So, given my new found knowledge. I felt I should probably ask before potentially clobbering (breaking) the server I'll be attempting this on. Will the following accomplish my goal? Current setup: /dev indicates the following: da0, da0c, da0cs1, da0s1, da0s1c da1, da1c, da1cs1, da1s1, da1s1c da2, da2c, da2cs1, da2s1, da2s1c ...and the following, which FreeBSD is installed on: da3, da3s1, da3s1a, da3s1b, da3s1c, da3s1d All drives are of same size/make/model. Given the above, I intend to issue the following: # gstripe label -v -s 131072 bigstripe \ /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2 /dev/da3 # newfs -U /dev/stripe/bigstripe # mount /dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe # echo 'geom_stripe_load=YES' /boot/loader.conf # echo '/dev/stripe/bigstripe /bigstripe ufs rw 2 2' /etc/fstab Yes, this should be fine (though you may need to do a gstripe load near the beginning). Or do/should I issue: # gconcat label
