Re: Software raid 1 on root partition?
On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 07:15:24AM +0200, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: On Sun, 14 Jul 2002 10:12:47 +0930 Greg 'groggy' Lehey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: G On Saturday, 13 July 2002 at 22:27:45 +0200, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: G It seems to be about RAID on standard non-raid controllers to my G poor eye. It does not mention that they will not work, only that there G are boot restrictions. G G I've been reading the atacontrol man page. It's not very clear, but G you could be right. If so, it's a well-kept secret. There also G appears to be no way to recover such a RAID 1 partition. I've found confirmation - There was a thread in -stable around the 18th of June (subject the new ATA driver vs. vinum) in which Bob Wilcox and Remo Lacho both mentioned running RAID arrays on non RAID controllers using the support in the ATA driver. Having RAID1 without recovery seems less than ideal though. I have been assuming (no confirmation as I haven't tried this yet) that the recovery process is to dump the file systems on the RAID1 configuration, replace the dead disk, reconfigure/newfs the filesystem, and then restore it. Certainly not ideal, but it still beats losing the data I think. The only part of this that I'm uncertain about is access to the array while one of its disks is dead. BTW, I've been running a RAID0+1 (striped and mirrored) configuration of 4 80GB IBM disks on this system for over a month now. Bob -- Bob Willcox Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by [EMAIL PROTECTED] spontaneously moving from where you left them to where Austin, TX you can't find them. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
Re: Poor Mans Software raid 1 on root partition?
At 06:03 PM 7.16.2002 +1200, Tortise@Paradise wrote: You can get a 3ware 7210 for $120: http://newegg.com it'll save you a lOT of time and heartache, and it's not that much $$... True, but if that 3ware quits making those cards and your card goes, your data is completely lost. And what if you choose not to upgrade each time 3ware spins the cards? How much testing does 3ware do against say the 6000 series? Can I take my drives on my 68XX card and plug them into a 78XX card and have them work? What about if 3ware creates an 88XX series? One significant advantage to software RAID is the fact that you can still extract your data from the disk even if you have to completely transplant the disks to different hardware. I think what I want to achieve is a second SCSI disc, which is regularly backed up to in some fashion, although in less than real time be OK. (vis a vis RAID) so long as it is a bootable reliable backup with a controllable interval backup. (Also avoids the hardware reliance. I have one machine (W2000) which has a backup RAID card so it can be got running again quickly..without worrying about sourcing another card. Clearly this is undesirable...) Does anyone do this? Regards David Hingston MB ChB MBA _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hingston.yi.org/ http://pcmc.yi.org/ If you seek a digitally signed response please advise. If you received a warning on reading this e-mail, please go to http://www.baycorpid.com/settings/email.asp?CA=healthcert to update your settings Please don't take this wrong, but on all OS lists, the emphasis always seems to be on the backup and very little on the restore -- and I'm speaking more from the disaster recovery -- to get back up and running within minutes. In raising the question about that, I have noticed few have ever tested any sort of backup plans to see if they really can restore, or how quickly they can restore. I for one would sure like to hear more about recovery plans. mine is to use two identical HDs on each server and run DD frequently, with tars for incremental. Thus, I have found it very simple to shut down, pull the bad HD, move HD #2 up and re cable it -- then boot and voila! I'm back up. THEN, add back any incremental while running in the meantime Yes, critical files are backed up over NFS to other machines and other types of backups used too, but I 'm only referring to getting up running as fast as possible. Tape restore is too slow for me please don't jump on me about tapes... I use them too but HDs are cheap and I use lost of them for fast backups and restores. Just for the sake of discussion. I'd be interested in hearing about more restores... successful ones... not plans to restore. Best regards, Jack L. Stone, Administrator SageOne Net http://www.sage-one.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
Re: Poor Mans Software raid 1 on root partition?
On Mon, 15 Jul 2002, Glen Mehn wrote: You can get a 3ware 7210 for $120: http://newegg.com it'll save you a lOT of time and heartache, and it's not that much $$... True, but if that 3ware quits making those cards and your card goes, your data is completely lost. And what if you choose not to upgrade each time 3ware spins the cards? How much testing does 3ware do against say the 6000 series? Can I take my drives on my 68XX card and plug them into a 78XX card and have them work? What about if 3ware creates an 88XX series? One significant advantage to software RAID is the fact that you can still extract your data from the disk even if you have to completely transplant the disks to different hardware. -a To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
Re: Poor Mans Software raid 1 on root partition?
On Monday 15 July 2002 11:30 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | Nick | Many thanks for your detailed and considered response. May I interact with | it? I shall presume I may. | | If you don't want a tape drive, it's still a better idea to do dumps to | another disk rather than dd. Why? | | 1. You can compress the output of dump. | | I prefer to have a (potentially) running bootable backup drive, so it can | be hot swapped. (Well almost) | | 2. You don't have to have identically partitioned disks | | Would I have to, to do that | | 3. You won't get a clean filesystem copying it with dd. In fact, the | source filesystem may change enough over the course of the dd that the | resulting image may be completely useless. | | mmm Now that is a problem to overcome. Maybe I need Dump and restore to | the backup HDD? I don't think that you said anything about dd in the first place. FWIW, I mirror with rsync. Even though it's not really remote it works nice for informal mirroring. | | 4. You can potentially store many, many days worth of backups on the | alternate drive. This lets you restore not just last night's backup, but | potentially last *week's*. | | And presumably I could do this on multiple HDD's also? I am afraid I am | biased by HDD copying. In my experience it works. Almost always. Can the | same be said for Tape drives? And there is no need to frig around | restoring so up running more quickly. Copying between HDD's is generally | quicker than tapes. (Well it was once) | | Yes, doing a restore takes a little more time than simply booting the | other drive. But in practice, the likelyhood that you will really *need* | to do so is sufficiently low as to not be worthwhile, IMHO. | | I guess that depends on how old your HDD is. The one in mind is old. (1G | is old isn't it??) However in my (limited) experience I have had more new | high performance drives fail under warranty than old ones. The 1G must | be due to expireLOL Its mate did yrs ago. | | The only reason to consider software raid for a truly mission critical | application is if you've got a really large dataset in an external box | that you can move from one machine to another if you need to get back up | quickly. In that circumstance, presumably the contents of the system | disk of the machine don't matter, meaning that the application would | come back on line simply by moving the disk to another machine and | restarting it. | | This is what I want, that is an acceptable scenario for me, especially in | terms of time input to fix and the (high) likelihood of it working. | | If that's unreasonable, then the whole machine requires | | RAID (among other things), which means you'll be getting a hardware RAID. | | IDE hardware RAID remains an option, (I think the promise cards are | supported, this is not 100% clear) but given I have some spare SCSI HDD | floating surplus I'd rather use them for now. | | But don't ever forget that RAID won't help you if you accidently do an | rm -rf / as root. :-) Data integrity is NOT a substitute for good | backups. | | Point well made. There is no backup panacea. | | We have to do what we judge to be acceptableand cost effective and what | we can live with in the event of.. | | Any further comments welcomed, especially anything pointing me in a | direction to proceed with. | Regards | David Hingston MB ChB MBA | _ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://hingston.yi.org/ | http://pcmc.yi.org/ | If you seek a digitally signed response please advise. | If you received a warning on reading this e-mail, please go to | http://www.baycorpid.com/settings/email.asp?CA=healthcert to update your | settings | - Original Message - | From: Nick Sayer [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | | | To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] | with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message -- Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) http://www.babbleon.org http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
Re: Poor Mans Software raid 1 on root partition?
You can get a 3ware 7210 for $120: http://newegg.com it'll save you a lOT of time and heartache, and it's not that much $$... True, but if that 3ware quits making those cards and your card goes, your data is completely lost. And what if you choose not to upgrade each time 3ware spins the cards? How much testing does 3ware do against say the 6000 series? Can I take my drives on my 68XX card and plug them into a 78XX card and have them work? What about if 3ware creates an 88XX series? One significant advantage to software RAID is the fact that you can still extract your data from the disk even if you have to completely transplant the disks to different hardware. I think what I want to achieve is a second SCSI disc, which is regularly backed up to in some fashion, although in less than real time be OK. (vis a vis RAID) so long as it is a bootable reliable backup with a controllable interval backup. (Also avoids the hardware reliance. I have one machine (W2000) which has a backup RAID card so it can be got running again quickly..without worrying about sourcing another card. Clearly this is undesirable...) Does anyone do this? Regards David Hingston MB ChB MBA _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hingston.yi.org/ http://pcmc.yi.org/ If you seek a digitally signed response please advise. If you received a warning on reading this e-mail, please go to http://www.baycorpid.com/settings/email.asp?CA=healthcert to update your settings To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
Re: Software raid 1 on root partition?
On Thu, 11 Jul 2002 09:10:15 -0500 Jim C. Nasby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: JCN No, there is no support for software raid on the root partition. This is JCN on the vinum wishlist, though, so hopefully it will happen at some Er - have you seen man atacontrol in RELENG_4 lately ? I will quote the most pertinent extract: Allthough the ATA driver allows for creating an ATA RAID on disks on any controller, there are restrictions. It is only pos sible to boot on an array if its either located on a real ATA RAID controller like the Promise or Highpoint controllers, or if the RAID declared is of RAID1 or SPAN type, in case of a SPAN the partition to boot must reside on the first disk in the SPAN So the answer is - yes you can. -- C:WIN | Directable Mirrors The computer obeys and wins.|A Better Way To Focus The Sun You lose and Bill collects. | licenses available - see: | http://www.sohara.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
Re: Software raid 1 on root partition?
On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 14:14 +0200, Lasse Laursen wrote: I'm currently in the process of upgrading our Linux servers to FreeBSD. The Linux servers uses software raid 1 on the boot/root partitions - is there a way to do the same under FreeBSD 4.6? The trick is to load a kernel with software RAID support even before you have a root filesystem with your kernel and modules on it. :) This is not different between Linux and FreeBSD. Putting everything you need to boot into a ramdisk and loading it with your favourite boot manager is the solution. (I'm not sure but maybe the newly created livecd port is of help, too. Or you have a look at how installation media are done.) virtually yours 82D1 9B9C 01DC 4FB4 D7B4 61BE 3F49 4F77 72DE DA76 Gerhard Sittig true | mail -s get gpg key [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- If you don't understand or are scared by any of the above ask your parents or an adult to help you. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
Re: Software raid 1 on root partition?
Excuse me if I step in here... Gerhard Sittig wrote: The trick is to load a kernel with software RAID support even before you have a root filesystem with your kernel and modules on it. :) This is not different between Linux and FreeBSD. Putting everything you need to boot into a ramdisk and loading it with your favourite boot manager is the solution. Ahm... where's the beef? I.e. where does this RAM-Disk Image come from? It's safe to *read* from one of the two disks, but what I don't understand is: Asume there are 4 disks: disk #1+#3 are RAID1 for -STABLE, disk #2+#4 are for -current. I want to boot -stable, so I try to load the RAM-Disk Image from disk #1 - but it's crashed. How do I know what disk to use next? Please answer per Mail too, I'm reading this list via docs.freebsd.org -- Ciao/BSD - Matthias Matthias Schuendehuette msch [at] snafu.de, Berlin (Germany) Powered by FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-stable in the body of the message
