Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 02:19:20 -0800 From: William Sang Min Bae <wbae@home.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG, cjclark@home.com Subject: Re: vinum (again) - 2 SCSI drives and performance/reliability issues Message-ID: <3.0.32.20000301021918.00931c20@24.2.10.70>
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Wow... Greg, is that you? Cool! So I have a question about vinum and the guy who actually wrote it answers back. You guys have great support! You know, I was about to give up on FreeBSD until I subscribed to this mailing list. BTW, thanks for the tip Chris! I guess what I'm trying to do is setup a low-cost/high-reliability web server (kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? hehehe -> k6III 400Mhz, 128meg SDRAM, 1Meg cache AOpen 59AX [or is it MX?], tekram DC390F UW scsi, 2X IBM DDRS-34560LW 4.5 gig U2W scsi). I'm a 3rd year Computer Science student and I'm thinking about starting my own web-hosting business. I was going to try to buy an Adaptec AAA-131U2, but it's not supported in FreeBSD 3.4 right now, I think. (its the cheapest RAID 5 controller around here at about $600 CND, can't afford to shell out $1500 canadian for a DPT raid controller). My problem is that I want to be able to have a way of mirroring or backing up as much of the system as I can. That's why I chose vinum. That is, ideally I'd like to have both drives setup as a RAID 1 array (mirroring, no striping). Okay, based on Chris Clark's suggestions, I'd try a 100MB root partiton on Drive0, then 128MB for swap on Drive1 (for performance reasons). Then create 2 identically sized partitions on both drives to use vinum (mirroring, concat). BTW, if you have 128MB of ram, is it better (performance-wise) then to use exactly the same amount of as swap? The FreeBSD handbook suggest 2.5 times the amount of ram, or 320MB. The problem that I have is, how do I configure a vinum partition to house /usr and everything else non-root before I actually install the /usr partition? That is, is it possible for me to run vinum as a boot-time option before I actually install any packages or distributions, so that I can install the basic distributions (everything except the root partition) inside a vinum partition? And in a company that I worked for they used to mirror the drives every night using "dd". Is that a good option? What other tools/programs can do something like this w/o impacting on the server's load too much? Anyways, thanks for the quick reply guys!!! Keep up the good work Greg, William At 02:46 PM 2/29/00 +1030, Greg Lehey wrote: >On Sunday, 27 February 2000 at 21:11:49 -0800, William Sang Min Bae wrote: >> I have newbie question about vinum too: >> >> I have 2 IBM 4.5GIG SCSI drives. I have setup FreeBSD-stable-3.4 on one of >> the drives w/ a 100mb root partition, a 256M swap partition (128megs ram) >> and the rest for the /usr directory (plus /var and /tmp inside /usr). >> >> How can I setup vinum to completely mirror the 2 drives and include all >> partitions in the same mirrored plex? Is this possible? Or can I only >> create vinum volumes on free partitions? Or alternatively, is there any >> way I can move my /usr (which also houses my /var and /tmp dirs) partition >> into a vinum volume? > >You can't (currently) turn an existing ufs partition into a Vinum >subdisk. I'm working on it, but it will require that there be at >least one real Vinum drive on the same disk, since otherwise Vinum >won't be able to locate the partition. > >Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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