Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 11:16:39 +0000 From: Karl Pielorz <kpielorz@tdx.co.uk> To: xique <xique-list@subatomic.net> Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: dpt raid controller Message-ID: <366FAD97.14DD9B35@tdx.co.uk> References: <199812100950.BAA29183@hub.freebsd.org>
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xique wrote: > > greetings! i'd like to state right away that i've searched the faq, handbook, > and various freebsd mailing lists (newbies, questions, hardware, scsi) > [snip] Nice to see someone does actually read the FAQ's (something I'm also guilty of missing out on sometimes ;-) > whew. on to the question. i've gathered that not all of the functions of the > raid card can be manipulated or monitored directly by the freebsd utilities. > one still needs to have a bootable partition with another o/s on it (like > dos). is this right? can someone give me a breakdown of what i can do from > freebsd and what i can't? particularly: initial setup of array, performance > monitoring, status monitoring, rebuilding, failure notices. >From BSD you can do at present, and AFAIK... Nothing... FreeBSD sees the logical drives on the DPT (e.g. on our system our 3 drives show up as 1 RAID5 logical drive), and can access them like a normal disk. If a drive fails, as far as FreeBSD is concerned - nothing has happened (so long as your RAID configuration is 'fault tolerant'). The DPT will start beeping until the situation is rectified. If the array is still operable (e.g. one drive down on a 3 drive RAID5 array) the system will continue to run. If you have a hot spare, and it's configured - the controller will start rebuilding onto the hot spare (this is a controller function, not under FreeBSD's control). And that's it... If you want to add drives to the array, change the rebuild parameters, reconfigure caching options etc. - you need to use the DOS utilities... Our FreeBSD system has a 10Mb DOS bootable partition on the RAID volume, which we can boot to, to make changes. > thanks very much in advance. i am about to embark on my first freebsd > experience and i hope to make it a fault-tolerant one. :) The DPT controllers are very good - we've used a number for Windows'NT and now for FreeBSD - and never had any problems... Support from FreeBSD is minimal, but I believe the driver writer (Simon Shapiro) was working on FreeBSD utilities to report / manipulate the controller... The last time I spoke to him was some time ago, these may still be 'in progress' - to be honest, I don't know... Our current philosophy on the setup is - if something screws up with a drive, we'll know about it - and have time to schedule maintenance to fix it... (i.e. if it breaks at 9am - we'll keep the system running in 'fault tolerant' mode until say 10pm, when we'll down it and fix it). If you need a more '24/7' solution you may have to look for a SCSI -2- SCSI RAID solution which would probably offer you things like independent intelligence (i.e. console connection to the RAID controller), hot swap etc. -Kp To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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