Has anybody EVER successfully recovered VINUM?

[Scott Mitchell]

On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 12:34:27PM +0100, Stijn Hoop wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 11:30:13AM +0000, Scott Mitchell wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 11:52:55AM +0100, Stijn Hoop wrote:
> > > AFAIK the only way to guarantee a consistent rebuild is to do it offline (at
> > > least in 4.x, haven't tested gvinum in 5.x yet).
> > > 
> > > > To play it safe you might want to unmount the volume before starting.
> > > 
> > > I *have* to.
> > 
> > I normally would unmount first if possible, to make the rebuild run faster
> > if nothing else.  Guess I'll make sure to do so in future.
> 
> I'm just saying that in my case it didn't work out well. As with any other
> advice, it might just work for you :)

Sure, I'm definitely not disagreeing with anything you're saying here.  I'm
inclined to think I have just been lucky the few times I've had to do this
in the past, and to maximise my good luck I should take the same
precautions that you do in the future :-)

I haven't played with gvinum yet either, but I'll probably be looking at a
hardware solution (FreeBSD-supported hardware RAID or network-attached
storage appliances) when the time comes to replace these servers.  Vinum
has been excellent, but I always find it really traumatic to deal with,
mostly because I have to touch it every 6 months at most.  There's always a
frantic hour re-reading the documentation, followed by a lot of "I really,
really, hope this works" moments before hitting Enter :-(

Cheers,

	Scott

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