gmirror problem on 5.3-R i386 (SOLVED)

[Doug Poland]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 09:51:03AM +0100, Christian Hiris wrote:
> Hash: SHA1
> On Thursday 13 January 2005 03:54, Doug Poland wrote:
> >
> > I'm having a problem with gmirror.  It would seem that I cannot add my
> > first disk to the mirror after booting off the second drive.  My current
> > status is a degraded mirror and I cannot see any of the partitions on
> > disk one.
> >
> > # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 bs=512 count=79
> 
> You probably destroyed your slice table here. The dd command only makes sense 
> if you insert whole disks (ie. /dev/ad4 and /dev/ad6) as providers. Otherwise 
> you need to create (or already have) a valid slice table on the disk, which 
> enables gmirror to locate and insert your slice. 
> 
One of my problems was incorrect partition sizes when I created the
bsdlabel for /dev/mirror/gm0s1.  I didn't really know what I was doing
nor did I understand the consequences of my actions ;)

> (!) Before you start to correct your gmirror setup, please read all of my 
> comments, because to me it looks like you run a mirror of ad6 and not ad6s1.    
>   
I'm not sure why gmirror label shows that but it's definately misleading.
Since this is a brand-new box with nothing but a minimal install, I
decided to re-install 5.3-R.  This time I got the install right and
gmirror reads:

Geom name: gm0s1
State: COMPLETE
Components: 2
Balance: round-robin
Slice: 4096
Flags: NONE
SyncID: 1
ID: 3524221455
Providers:
1. Name: mirror/gm0s1
   Mediasize: 80026329088 (75G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r5w5e1
Consumers:
1. Name: ad4
   Mediasize: 80026361856 (75G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r5w5e2
   State: ACTIVE
   Priority: 0
   Flags: DIRTY
   SyncID: 1
   ID: 2031344187
2. Name: ad6
   Mediasize: 80026361856 (75G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r5w5e2
   State: ACTIVE
   Priority: 0
   Flags: DIRTY
   SyncID: 1
   ID: 3116345061

Geom name: gm0s1.sync


I'm going to include the steps I took, with one deviation from the
published doc I referenced, and ask a couple more questions.


1	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad6 bs=512 count=79
2	fdisk -v -B -I /dev/ad6
3	
4	gmirror label -v -n -b round-robin gm0s1 /dev/ad6s1
5	gmirror load
6	
7	bsdlabel -w -B /dev/mirror/gm0s1
8	bsdlabel -e /dev/mirror/gm0s1
9	
10	newfs -U /dev/mirror/gm0s1a
11	mount /dev/mirror/gm0s1a /mnt
12	dump -L -0 -f- / | ( cd /mnt ; restore -r -v -f- )
13	newfs -U /dev/mirror/gm0s1d
14	mount /dev/mirror/gm0s1d /mnt/var
15	dump -L -0 -f- /var | ( cd /mnt/var ; restore -r -v -f- )
16	newfs -U /dev/mirror/gm0s1e
17	mount /dev/mirror/gm0s1e /mnt/tmp
18	dump -L -0 -f- /tmp | ( cd /mnt/tmp ; restore -r -v -f- )
19	newfs -U /dev/mirror/gm0s1f
20	mount /dev/mirror/gm0s1f /mnt/usr
21	dump -L -0 -f- /usr | ( cd /mnt/usr ; restore -r -v -f- )
22	
23	cp -p /mnt/etc/fstab /mnt/etc/fstab.orig
24	sed -e 's/dev\/ad4s1/dev\/mirror\/gm0s1/g' < /mnt/etc/fstab.orig > /mnt/etc/fstab
25	echo 'swapoff="YES"' >> /mnt/etc/rc.conf
26	echo 'geom_mirror_load="YES"' >> /mnt/boot/loader.conf
27	echo "1:ad(6,a)/boot/loader" > /boot.config
28	
29	shutdown -r now
30	
31	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 bs=512 count=79
32	fdisk -v -B -I /dev/ad4
33	gmirror configure -a gm0s1
34	gmirror insert gm0s1 /dev/ad4s1
35	sh -c 'while [ ".`gmirror list | grep SYNCHRONIZING`" != . ]; do sleep 1; done'
36	
37	shutdown -r now

On line 32, I deviated from the instructions on:

	http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/ 

The published command was:

size=`fdisk ad6 | grep ', size ' | head -1 | sed -e 's;^.*size \([0-9]*\).*$;\1;'` (echo "p 1 165 63 $size"; echo "a 1") | fdisk -v -B -f- -i /dev/ad4

That command returned:  "improperly placed quotes ()".  I set the value
of $size manually but it was some small number like 50000.  I wrote it
to ad4 but the command on line 33 puked.  So I simply issued the command
shown on line 32.

Question:  On line 27 we issue the command to...
# instruct boot stage 2 loader on first disk to boot
# with the boot stage 3 loader from the second disk
# (mainly because BIOS might not allow easy booting from second ATA disk
# or at least requires manual intervention on the console)

So how do I get rid of that boot.config file?  Should I get rid of it?

Question: On line 25 we set swapoff=YES.  Is this necessary if I'm going
to run 5-STABLE?  What are the implications of having swap on a mirror
like this?

Thanks for your help!

-- 
Regards,
Doug