OK, I've got a pickle, and I can't seem to find my way out. I'm quite familiar with Solaris, but all of this Live CD and zfs stuff is quite new to me.
I have a server with 12x1TB SATA drives on a Areca 1130 controller (JBOD), it also has a 4GB CF on a PATA interface. I want to have my BE on the CF, and a huge RAIDZ2 zpool across 11 of the disks, with one hot spare. I've reached the conclusion that a 4GB CF card isn't nearly big enough to handle upgrades to the BE (after losing 500MB to swap.) The upgrade to 93 was substantially more than it could handle. So, I'm guessing that I just need to scrub the CF altogether, and go with the Areca alone. When I boot the LiveCD, I see the CF card w/o a problem, but the Areca is missing. There's a driver for it, SUNWarcmsr, that was supposed to be integrated by snv 93, but evidently wasn't. So, I figured I'd just go and load the driver before running the installer. When i tried to install it using pkgadd, I didn't have enough disk space to backup /var/sadm/install. I first figured I'd add in a second ramdisk into the zpool, but then I found out it's not in a zpool. So, that was thwarted. So, I then looked for documentation on how to increase the size of the ramdisk, but I found nothing there. Then, I looked around for documentation on how to get the driver loaded at boot time. Areca does supply a ITU disk image, but I don't have a disk drive, and the Indiana installer never prompts me to load a driver disk anyway. Then I thought I'd get clever and load the drivers into the LiveCD image before burning it to CD. So, I did some more documentation searching. I found some references to ITU tools that are coming Real Soon Now, but nothing that I can use today. So, I don't appear to be able to do that either. Another thing I don't quite get is how to handle this boot procedure. In old school Solaris, I'd usually have a RAID1 mirror for /, and I'd boot to that device (and if that failed, boot to the other). Can I do the same thing with a raidz2 pool? I wouldn't think I could, so I'd need to keep my kernel image on the CF, and boot from that with root living on the raidz2 pool, but I'm evidently not figuring out how to set that up. How do I get that working with the Indiana installer? Do I have to go back to a Jumpstart config? That's going to be annoying out here, since I'm just now introducing Solaris. Does anyone have any advice on how to configure this monster? Thanks. duckhead This message posted from opensolaris.org
