Installing FreeBSD onto Vinum-volumes?

[Kirk Strauser]

At 2003-07-23T18:21:42Z, Eivind Olsen <eivind at aminor.no> writes:

> Are you able to have a mirrored root-device (/) with this approach? Or
> will you end up with having a single copy of / on one drive?

I end up with a single copy of '/'.  However, I partition (both,all) drives
identically, so that each has a 200MB-or-so slice at the beginning.  I use
rsync from a cron job to make backups of '/' to the starting slice of each
drive.

The reasons I do this are that:

1) Any old FreeBSD boot floppy/CD can read the "mirrors" of '/' in the event
   that the root drive dies, regardless of the state of vinum.  Makes
   disaster recovery that much easier.

2) You get a little bit of versioning for free.  Accidentally overwrite
   /etc/master.passwd with mergemaster?  Just grab the copy from
   /rootbackup.

>> Out of curiosity, what offsets have you had to calculate?

> I've read a bit of a chapter from the 4th edition of The Complete FreeBSD:
> <http://www.vinumvm.org/cfbsd/vinum.pdf> (or, as text
> <http://www.vinumvm.org/cfbsd/vinum.txt>).  It suggests to install the
> swap-partition first on the drive, setup a slice for vinum to cover the
> entire drive and then run bsdlabel and change the offset and size for the
> swap and vinum partitions.

Weird.  I've never bothered with any of that.  I always just call "create"
with:

  sd length 0 drive myDrive1

and let vinum calculate the correct sizes.
-- 
Kirk Strauser
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