vinum experimentation

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 30 December 2003 at 14:15:44 -0500, Stephen Corbesero wrote:
>
> I hope this is information is useful.  I am really hoping to have a
> working vinum in FreeBSD 5.x.
>
> As we all know, vinum has been cranky for a little while now.  It
> seemed to work fine for me in the early 5.0's, but went 'south"
> sometime as the 5.1's began coming out.

Well, what happened were incompatibilities with changes introduced
with GEOM.  Specifically, swap on Vinum currently doesn't work, and
it'll take a rewrite before it does.

> I have been playing with it on a couple of machines at work, and I
> have noticed the following behaviors.  I am mostly playing with
> mirroring some volumes on two IDE drives.
>
>   * If I start vinum manually after the system is up, and shut it down
>     manually before I do a reboot, the configuration seems to survive
>     just fine.  On the next boot, I can again start vinum manually,
>     the drives are read, and I can mount the partitions.
>
>   * If I let vinum come up automatically (setting start_vinum="YES" in
>     rc.conf), then one of the following will happen.
>
>       a) a system panic before the boot process is completed

Do you have a dump?

>       b) at least one of the vinum can not be found, so anything that
>          drive is down/faulty.   did discover, however, that if I
>          recreate the drive in vinum, the plexes cheerfully come
>       back.

Do you have log files?

>       c) the vinum drives can be found, but no volumes are defined
>          anymore

More details?

> If this is useful, and someone would like more information, I'll be
> happy to continue my experiments.

This level of information is not very useful.  I do all these things
all the time, and I don't have problems.  On the other hand, if you're
having problems, I'd like to know why.  Take a look at
http://www.vinumvm.org/vinum/how-to-debug.html and supply the
appropriate information.  That way we have a hope of solving the
problems.

FWIW, most problems I've seen with Vinum have been pilot error.

Greg
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