From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 10 6: 0:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from nx5.HRZ.Uni-Dortmund.DE (nx5.HRZ.Uni-Dortmund.DE [129.217.131.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DE89D37B479 for ; Fri, 10 Nov 2000 06:00:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from luzi.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de by nx5.HRZ.Uni-Dortmund.DE via smtp-local with SMTP; Fri, 10 Nov 2000 15:00:49 +0100 Received: from luzi (luzi [129.217.180.22]) by luzi.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA15973 for ; Fri, 10 Nov 2000 15:00:47 +0100 (MET) Message-Id: <200011101400.PAA15973@luzi.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de> Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 15:00:47 +0100 (MET) From: "\"Ulrich_Gruenebaum\"" Reply-To: "\"Ulrich_Gruenebaum\"" Subject: Vinum setup questions To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-MD5: zd49okvE8PtF3hdq6iGRNw== X-Mailer: dtmail 1.2.1 CDE Version 1.2.1 SunOS 5.6 sun4m sparc Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, I posted this to other lists some days ago, but got no replies yet. Any comments on the following are appreciated. I just set up a 16GB mirrored volume (RAID-1) with vinum on FreeBSD 4.1.1 using two 16GB harddisks. Vinum is great and I think I got it to work after all, but I have still some questions remaining. By the way, is there a way to get vinum's own version number out of vinum? This would be helpful for reference purposes as in this text. I find the vinum man pages quite clear and helpful, but I was unsure about how to prepare the new disks, i.e. what to do exactly *before* putting them into the vinum configuration with "vinum create", and what exactly to do *afterwards* (when vinum finally provides them as a single volume). There was not much help on this topic from the vinum manpages; is there any further documentation on this topic available (except, of course, the manpages dedicated for "disklabel" and "newfs", which do not cover aspects of application order)? To set up the mirrored volume, I tried the following, based on the "mirror" example from vinum(8). The two 16GB disks are /dev/da1 and /dev/da2. Can anyone tell me, whether what I did is halfways reasonable (for my config file, see below)? 1. disklabel -w -r da1 auto disklabel -w -r da2 auto (to get the new disks labeled initially) 2. disklabel -e disklabel -e (to manually create a vinum partition on both disks, see below for "disklabel" output) 3. vinum: create -v init -v -w mirror.p0 init -v -w mirror.p1 start mirror start mirror.p1.s0 4. newfs -v /dev/vinum/mirror (to put a filesystem on the volume) Doing so, the following problems occured (any comments appreciated): In step 3: Before "start mirror.p1.s0" (starting the subdisk of the second plex explicitly), the first of the plexes was in state "up" (as should be), but the second was shown as "faulty", which I had not expected (see vinum(4): "faulty: a plex which has gone completely down because of I/O errors"); vinum(8) (section GOTCHAS) says, the state of all newly-created plexes except the first would be "stale". Nevertheless, following the "start mirror.p1.s0" command, the subdisk was revived and afterwards showed state "up" as wanted. In step 4: vinum(8) and vinum(4) tell to run "newfs" on the *raw* volume device, e.g. "/dev/vinum/rmirror". There was no such device in my case, nor could I find any directory named "/dev/rvinum" (as in the example directory listing in vinum(4), section OBJECT NAMING), instead the only device I found was "/dev/vinum/mirror". I tried a "newfs" command on it and it seems to work. Nevertheless, I don't know what happend exactly doing so and I don't feel very well with this. It would be helpful if vinum itself could list the created volume device name(s) with the "list" command. The vinum configuration file I used: # vinum config file drive d1 device /dev/da1a drive d2 device /dev/da2a volume mirror plex org concat sd length 0 drive d1 plex org concat sd length 0 drive d2 Output of "disklabel da1" command (same for da2): # /dev/da1c: type: SCSI disk: QUANTUM <--snip--> 8 partitions: # size offs. fstype ... a: 35861388 0 vinum # (Cyl. 0-17510*) c: 35861388 0 unused # (Cyl. 0-17510*) Some suggested man page improvements: - I didn't find a notice, what the device names of the volumes are, which I just created, i.e. on which device I had to run "newfs" and which to mount finally. It seems that for the mirror example a device "/dev/vinum/mirror" was created. This could be explained in more detail and the device names perhaps be listed in section FILES in vinum(8). - The default location for the vinum logfile (vinum(8), section "LOG FILE") seems to be /var/log/vinum_history, not /var/tmp/... . The logfile should also be mentioned in vinum(8), section FILES. - A small subsection and an example in vinum(8) regarding how and in which order to initialize new disks before they can be used from vinum (i.e. "disklabel" command) would be nice; and also an example of what to do until the new vinum volume can be mounted anywhere ("newfs" command). This could be inserted in vinum(8) in section HOW TO SET UP VINUM. In my case, I've already installed some hundreds of gigabytes of diskspace on Solaris, Linux and Windows systems, but the procedure for each system differs more or less completely from the others concerning the tools to use and the order in which to use them, therefore I had appreciated some information on this in the vinum context. Thanks a lot for your answers! Cheers Ulrich -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ulrich Gruenebaum grueneba@luzi.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message