Re: Gstripe during install
n j wrote: John, thank you very much for your detailed input. If it were me, I would a small (for some definition of small considering your disk space and software needs) partition on the first disk and install everything to that. After the system is up, create an identical partition on the second disk and set up gmirror between the two (see below). This volume would house either the entire OS or just the root partition at your option, but it needs to be large enough to house at least a minimal install of the OS temporarily. I'd then create additional partitions using the remaining space on each disk and turn those into a new, blank gstripe volume. If you don't want the whole OS on your mirror, you could then move /usr, etc over to the stripe volume (but you don't have to). That's basically the answer I got in the meantime from a few of my more experienced colleagues as well. So, I'll probably go with that option and create a 512Mb root partition on the first disk, install the OS, create a gmirror and add the second disk to the mirror, build the RAID-1 array, then gstripe the rest and move /usr, /tmp, /var to it etc. On a side note, it would be nice if creating RAID arrays was included in the FreeBSD install similar to Debian install (according to my colleague, haven't seen it myself). There is some work going on to try and get a more up to date installer with options such as installing to RAID (http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall) but no eta as its still a work in progress (I like sysinstall but it just doesnt do everything I'd like any more. I hope someone writes a sysinstall like interface for finstall as well as the gui one.) As another more complex workaround you shouldnt be able to boot from a live CD (freesbie maybe) create the gstripe you want, then install the base system manually (see http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-stick-episode-2 for some pointers on doing that) and edit fstab as needed. Vince Regards, ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Gstripe during install
John, thank you very much for your detailed input. If it were me, I would a small (for some definition of small considering your disk space and software needs) partition on the first disk and install everything to that. After the system is up, create an identical partition on the second disk and set up gmirror between the two (see below). This volume would house either the entire OS or just the root partition at your option, but it needs to be large enough to house at least a minimal install of the OS temporarily. I'd then create additional partitions using the remaining space on each disk and turn those into a new, blank gstripe volume. If you don't want the whole OS on your mirror, you could then move /usr, etc over to the stripe volume (but you don't have to). That's basically the answer I got in the meantime from a few of my more experienced colleagues as well. So, I'll probably go with that option and create a 512Mb root partition on the first disk, install the OS, create a gmirror and add the second disk to the mirror, build the RAID-1 array, then gstripe the rest and move /usr, /tmp, /var to it etc. On a side note, it would be nice if creating RAID arrays was included in the FreeBSD install similar to Debian install (according to my colleague, haven't seen it myself). Regards, -- Nino ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Gstripe during install
On Friday 07 September 2007, n j wrote: Hello, I have a machine which has 2 (identical) hard disks. I would like to create RAID-0 GEOM stripe (gstripe(8)) to merge these 2 disks into 1 disk with larger capacity and install FreeBSD on it. There is this article (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html) which shows how to setup RAID-1 gmirror during install suggesting that what I'm trying to accomplish is possible. However, I haven't found any pointers to doing same with gstripe. If anyone knows how to do this and if it's possible at all, please share. On the other hand, if setting up gstripe during install is not possible, is it possible to install FreeBSD on one disk and later setup the gstripe to use the entire capacity? Or, since performance is not a key issue here, maybe use gconcat? Any input is appreciated! I assume you're aware of all the caveats that go along with using RAID-0 (no redundancy, twice as likely to fail, etc.). You can't use the method Dru outlines to create a gstripe volume since you can't add drives to a gstripe after it's created. Also you can't boot from a gconcat volume like you can from a gmirror volume. It _is_ possible to use gconcat followed by growfs to add drives to an existing volume, but I'm not sure it would be possible to boot from such a volume. If it were me, I would a small (for some definition of small considering your disk space and software needs) partition on the first disk and install everything to that. After the system is up, create an identical partition on the second disk and set up gmirror between the two (see below). This volume would house either the entire OS or just the root partition at your option, but it needs to be large enough to house at least a minimal install of the OS temporarily. I'd then create additional partitions using the remaining space on each disk and turn those into a new, blank gstripe volume. If you don't want the whole OS on your mirror, you could then move /usr, etc over to the stripe volume (but you don't have to). See this link for a more fail-safe way to create a mirror on an already-running system than Dru's howto: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/geom-mirror.html The key difference is that the handbook version has you create a new, blank mirror and move everything to it (using dump/restore) instead of converting an existing volume over to a mirror directly and running the risk of the last sector getting clobbered by the GEOM metadata. On a whole disk the last sector is _generally_ not used by the filesystem but it's best to be sure, and the above statement is NOT true for partial-disk slices and/or partitions, especially if their sizes are round (for some power of two) numbers. You'll also want to get at least minimally familiar with the fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs commands. Good luck and feel free to ask additional questions. JN ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Gstripe during install
On Friday 07 September 2007, John Nielsen wrote: I assume you're aware of all the caveats that go along with using RAID-0 (no redundancy, twice as likely to fail, etc.). You can't use the method Dru outlines to create a gstripe volume since you can't add drives to a gstripe after it's created. Also you can't boot from a gconcat volume like you can from a gmirror volume. I meant to say you can't boot from a _gstripe_ volume.. Not sure about gconcat but I mentioned that in the following paragraph. JN ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Gstripe during install
n j wrote: On a side note, it would be nice if creating RAID arrays was included in the FreeBSD install similar to Debian install (according to my colleague, haven't seen it myself). I agree, but this would take a non-trivial effort to make happen. I hope you'll consider working on it or perhaps contributing resources to fund the people who could do it. The way I approached your initial challenge was to install everything to a large, cheap SATA drive. On the for-real drives I gmirror the root partition, stripe swap and tmp, ran graid3 on /var and /usr, and then dump | restored from the large/cheap drive to the array. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
