Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 21:44:18 -0500 (EST) From: Mohan Khurana <mohan@razorfish.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Mission Critical FreeBSD System Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003302123390.8537-100000@18arhans.razorfish.com>
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Dear questions,
One of my current projects involves building a mission critical FreeBSD
box. Part of my definition of mission critical means that I must take
into account any and all places where the box might fail and account for
that possible point of failure. The box has already been built up by one
of my coworkers.
The box has two SCSI equally sized hard disks installed in it, as well as
a controller that can do hardware level RAID 1 (mirroring, I
believe). Here is the information from dmesg about our DPT controller:
dpt0: <DPT Caching SCSI RAID Controller> rev 0x02 int a irq 7 on pci0.16.0
dpt0: DPT PM3224A FW Rev. 07G0, 1 channel, 64 CCBs
Information about the drives:
da0 at dpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <SEAGATE ST34502LW 0006> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
da0: Tagged Queueing Enabled
da0: 4340MB (8888923 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 553C)
da1 at dpt0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0
da1: <SEAGATE ST34502LW 0006> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
da1: Tagged Queueing Enabled
da1: 4340MB (8888412 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 553C)
Here is where things get sticky:
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.
So now I am faced with a problem: I some how need to get some sort of
disk redundancy going on this machine. When I say redundancy, I mean the
whole disk, including the kernel. At this point it makes no difference if
the redundancy is performed via software or with hardware. One big
problem with vinum is that it seems to load itself after the kernel has
booted, which is a big problem. The solutions to this problem with vinum
do not seem to be very clean, easy, or safe to implement.
So I am now confused and asking you all, questions@freebsd.org, for
advice, based on the given hardware, on what to do to get disk redundancy
on this machine.
Thanks much,
mohan
| || ||| || r a z o r f i s h , new york
mohan khurana
[ i.t. consultant, cts ]
>> fax +1.212.966.6915
>> http://fish.razorfish.com/mohan
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