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Date:      Tue, 2 May 2000 16:08:31 +0200
From:      "Marius Vincent" <mvincent@elcb.co.za>
To:        <webmaster@wmptl.com>
Cc:        "freeBSD-Questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: vinum
Message-ID:  <NEBBJNFFELDAHIBIGIAMOEMBCBAA.mvincent@elcb.co.za>
In-Reply-To: <390EDC99.A77180C7@wmptl.com>

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Hi

Well actually you can software mirror a complete phisical disk, INCLUDING
"/".
The mirroring sofware writes in raw format.It reproduces block for block on
drives.
ONLY RAID5 and so on cannot be software mirrored,because you have to bring
up your operating software first and then bringup your software raid
package.This will in turn activate the raid devices.If you run hardware raid
like Clarion. The operating system thinks you only have 1 phisical disk and
has absolutely nothing to do with raid at all.

The point being that you can indeed sofware raid a complete phisical
disk.(Even microcrap can do this with standard NT4.0).

Thanx for the help.I must not f*ck around on my mailbox with this.
Tell me how safe is this program to use if you have no idea what you are
doing?

Marius Vincent
ELCB Info Services


>I'm trying to do much the same as you are. We're attempting to setup
FreeBSD boxes with mirrored drives for speed/redundancy, yet we do not
want to pay for a hardware raid. Vinum/CCD is what you're looking for,
try a  'man ccd', and a 'man ccdconfig' they'll tell you how to
accomplish the task. Please note though, that you cannot mirror / (the
root), nor can you mirror a partition that you would boot from. I
reccomend getting a smaller (500megs or so) hardisk and putting the
identical drives to be mirrored into primary/slave, and
secondary/master. My configurations is as follows:

AMD K62-500mhz, 256megs Ram (just if you're curious),
Quantum Fireball 365meg Ide as primary master,
Maxtor 7200RPM 15Gig ata33 as primary slave,
(mirrored to first Maxtor HD) - Maxtor 7200RPM 15Gig ata33 as secondary
Master,
50X Acer eide cdrom as secondary/slave,
I have the 365meg HD mounted as /, and the two 15gig drives are
seperated into 800Meg swap and /server (same partition table accross
both drives), using ccd to mirror the partitions.

Hope this will help you out a little,

Nathan Vidican
webmaster@wmptl.com
Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
http://www.wmptl.com/


> Marius Vincent wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> Has anyone used vinum before??
> Please let me know where I can find more help about starting off with
> vinum.
> I want to purchase an identical IDE secondary drive to my primary
> sothat I can mirror the two of them.
> Any way I must startoff with vinum??
>
> Thanx
>
> Marius Vincent
> Technical
> ELCB Information Services
>
>



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