Can I Rebuild / and /usr Remotely? Ideas?

Drew Tomlinson drew at mykitchentable.net
Tue Sep 20 10:02:49 PDT 2005


I have a system running 5.4-STABLE.  I created a geom_stripe disk for 
/usr.  It works fine except that upon reboot, the stripe attempts to 
load itself twice and thus fails.  Therefore, since I have no /usr, the 
system comes up in single user mode.  At that point I can do 'kldunload 
geom_stripe' and then 'kldload geom_stripe' to get the stripe built and 
finish booting my system.  I sent a problem report describing this 
behavior.  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=83521  Please see 
it for details.

Based upon the information in the pr, the commiter suggests clearing all 
metadata on the stripe providers and starting over.

When I built this system, I configured the disks using sysinstall.  I 
used the "dangerously dedicated"mode just as I had when I ran the 4.x 
series.  I suspect my problems occur because geom_stripe doesn't get 
along well with disks that are "dangerously dedicated". 

Anyway, my system has 2 9gb drives (da0 and da1) that I wish to use for 
the main system.   I want a 500mb slice as /dev/da0s1a for '/', a 500mb 
slice as /dev/da1s1b for swap, and the rest of each drive as 
/dev/daXs1d.  I will build my stripe with /dev/da0s1d and /dev/da1s1d 
and mount it at /usr.  Other directories such as /var, /home, etc. will 
be symlinked to /usr/var, /usr/home, etc.

I have remote console access to this machine and want to attempt to 
rebuild the system remotely.  If I mess up, it's not too difficult to 
physically get to the box but I would like to avoid it if possible.  I 
have another disk on the system (ad0) that is available and large enough 
to hold the contents of both da0 and da1.  Can I backup my system, do 
the needed operations on da0 and da1, restore da0 and da1, reboot, and 
still have a working system?  I've never used fdisk, bsdlabel, newfs, 
and whatever else I might need from the command line.  Besides the man 
pages, are there any guides for what I want to do?  Even a simple "first 
this, then this, then this" type of guide will help me get started.

I'd appreciate any help or suggestions on the best way to accomplish 
this task.  I would also appreciate any second opinions regarding other 
ways to get geom_stripe working properly on this box.

Thanks,

Drew

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