gconcat question

[Roger Olofsson]

<-----Ursprungligt Meddelande-----> 
>From: John Nielsen [lists at jnielsen.net]
>Sent: 19/10/2008 3:39:00 AM
>To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Cc: raggen at passagen.se
>Subject: Re: gconcat question
>
>On Saturday 18 October 2008, Roger Olofsson wrote:
>> What are the steps to bring back gconcatenated disks if doing an
upgrade
>> from FreeBSD6 to FreeBSD7 like this?
>>
>> As-is situation:
>> FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE ad0 has FreeBSD ad1, ad2 and ad3 are gconcatenated
>> using 'gconcat label -v data /dev/ad1 /dev/ad2 /dev/ad3'.
>
>The concat device should just appear automatically after the upgrade as
long 
>as you (continue to) load the geom_concat kernel module. Be aware that
if 
>the on-disk metadata format has changed then it will automatically be 
>upgraded. This is usually a good thing but if you need to roll back to
6.x 
>for some reason it's something to take into consideration.
>
>> Planned upgrade:
>> Reboot from cdrom, install FreeBSD7 from cd to ad0
>
>Just curious, is there a reason you're going this route instead of
upgrading 
>from source?
>
>JN
>.
>

Hello John and thank you for your reply!

Follow-up question - /dev contains a /dev/concat/label entry - is this
entry created when loader.conf invokes the kernel module?

The machine won't be rollbacked so that's not an issue. 

The reason for following this route is that it's faster than doing it
from source (it's an old machine). The machine has been a playground and
has alot of ports installed that aren't being used anymore. The
concatenated drives contain data only hence the need to preserve those.

/Roger