Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 17:44:20 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Mohan Khurana <mohan@razorfish.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mission Critical FreeBSD System Message-ID: <20000401174420.C256@hades.hell.gr> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003302123390.8537-100000@18arhans.razorfish.com>; from mohan@razorfish.com on Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 09:44:18PM -0500 References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003302123390.8537-100000@18arhans.razorfish.com>
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On Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 09:44:18PM -0500, Mohan Khurana wrote: | ... | My coworker did not enable hardware level RAID 1 BEFORE the install. The | configuration utility for DPT (it's a DOS based program), doesn't seem to | allow for a new RAID device to be created and then syncing all of the data | from the first drive onto the second drive. It only has an option to wipe | the current contents of the drives and create a new RAID device that can | be accesses from an OS that is to be freshly installed. I don't know if I got this right, but I think that the only thing you can do safely is to back your disks up, configure your hardware controller in whichever way you find preferable, then restore the backup you have kept. I admit this can be tricky, and it might require you to have a spare disk at and, to install a version of BSD on it, in order to be able to use the 'restore' program to write to the 2-disk raid your backed up data. If the machine can not go down for the time required to do an installation of a new release, and restore of backed-up data, then I think that it's not possible to do this without a second machine of similar hardware. The minimum downtime is if you use a second machine (not necessarily raid-based) to make a 'copy' of the current system. Then swap the two machines, and leave the 'copy' in place, while you're playing with the raid-disks. After you're done setting up the raid disks, swap again, and you're done [take care for logs and files that changed on the 'copy' while it was in place of the raid-system]. Just my $.02, - Giorgos Keramidas To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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