Fresh install onto geom_stripe or geom_mirror?

[John Hay]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 12:31:51AM -0400, Paul Mather wrote:
> Does anyone have any advice as to the best way to do a fresh install
> onto an all-mirrored or all-striped geom setup?

There seems to be a lot of possible combinations and I tried a few of
them, each time thinking that I did something wrong and all the time
it was just the smp race that was tripping me up. :-)

It is your choice if you want to use "raw" disks or work in a slice.
We now have two machines here with a geom mirror setup, the one using
a slice and the one not. My preference would be to use a slice, but
when I got it to work, I had the setup without slices and I was too
lazy to change it. :-)

I did a minimum install on the first disk. Then I prepared the second
disk. For the raw disk I used glabel, gmirror and bsdlabel. I then
mounted the new partitions and copied everything to the new partitions
using tar. I then fixed up the new fstab to use the geom partitions
and add geom_mirror_load="YES" and geom_label_load="YES" to the new
loader.conf. Then I rebooted with the new disk and used gmirror
insert to add the initial disk. I'm trying out swap on the mirror,
so I modified the line "stop_cmd=':'" in /etc/rc.d/swap1 to
"stop_cmd='swapoff -a'".

The output of "sysctl -b kern.geom.conftxt" on this machine looks like
this:

0 DISK ad6 80026361856 512 hd 16 sc 63
1 LABEL label/disk1 80026361344 512 i 0 o 0
2 MIRROR mirror/gm0 80026360832 512
3 BSD mirror/gm0e 77878877184 512 i 4 o 2147483648 ty 7
3 BSD mirror/gm0d 536870912 512 i 3 o 1610612736 ty 7
3 BSD mirror/gm0c 80026360832 512 i 2 o 0 ty 0
3 BSD mirror/gm0b 1073741824 512 i 1 o 536870912 ty 1
3 BSD mirror/gm0a 536870912 512 i 0 o 0 ty 7
0 DISK ad4 80026361856 512 hd 16 sc 63
1 LABEL label/disk0 80026361344 512 i 0 o 0
2 MIRROR mirror/gm0 80026360832 512
3 BSD mirror/gm0e 77878877184 512 i 4 o 2147483648 ty 7
3 BSD mirror/gm0d 536870912 512 i 3 o 1610612736 ty 7
3 BSD mirror/gm0c 80026360832 512 i 2 o 0 ty 0
3 BSD mirror/gm0b 1073741824 512 i 1 o 536870912 ty 1
3 BSD mirror/gm0a 536870912 512 i 0 o 0 ty 7

John
-- 
John Hay -- John.Hay at icomtek.csir.co.za / jhay at FreeBSD.org