B Da Bahia wrote: > Hello, > > I'm a newbie to OpenBSD, and I'm trying to install a new system with all > partitions (/, et al) on a software RAID 1 discipline. > >>From the FAQs, I see that you don't recommend using RAIDframe + ccd for new > installs. > > But in the softraid manpage, you say that "There is no boot support at this > time for any disciplines". > > If by any means possible I'd like to have the / partition on RAID 1 as well. > > What leads me to the question: what should I do? > > Any tutorials that folks could recommend to have all partitions on RAID 1? > > thanks in advance!
think about this a while. Let's assume you have a PC with a semi-typical BIOS (pretending there is such a thing). You have two disks, wd0 and wd1. You soft-mirror them. wd0 fails, but is still in the machine. Do you really think your BIOS will magically jump over a dead but recognizable disk to boot off a good disk? I'd not bet on that. Worse, what if the disk PARTLY dies, and the system STARTS to boot from wd0? In that case, I can promise you it will NOT say "oh, that didn't work, let's try wd1". Software mirroring of the boot on PCs has some serious limitations in general (I've seen HW RAID bumble this, too, for what it is worth). What are you storing on your root partition that changes so often you need to have it on a RAID system? There are very few places where mirroring the boot partition in software on a PC-like machine is superior to using the /altroot system that's in place, and a few places where /altroot is superior to mirroring. Think of a firewall...you make a change to pf.conf, it doesn't quite work, you change it back, but can't recall what it was originally...there it is sitting on your /altroot partition as it was late last night (ok, this particular example is solvable in other ways too...) Nick.
