Gvinum functionality

[Stephen Corbesero]

I have a machine that has been functioning as a news and anonymous ftp
server.  This machine was running FreeBSD-5 using vinum on four 200GB
firewire drives.  The vinum configuration was always a little flaky
because, but it was generally okay if I didn't try to make changes.

About three weeks ago, one of the drives failed and I used that as an
excuse to update the machine to FreeBSD6-stable and switch from the
old vinum to the GEOM based gvinum.

In the process of doing the upgrades and restores, I built volumes
with only one plex to start, with the intention of adding the second
plex to complete the mirror once everything was back in place.

I have been unable to do this.  The attach command is not yet
implemented in gvinum.  I tried to create with the new plex listed as
being part of the volume, but that didn't work well either.  First, I
forgot to fully name the pieces and ended up with a volume home that
had the following components

volume home
  plex home.p0
    sd home.p0.s0
    sd home.p0.s1
  plex .p0
    sd .p0.s0
    sd .p0.s1

Despite the unusual naming scheme, this would have been okay, but it
actually killed my home volume.  The new plex (.p0) started as "up",
and I am sure its contents were inconsistent.  I didn't see any way to
"synchronize" , and I would have been afraid to because how would it
know which plex was the good data.

Needless to say, getting rid of .p0, .p0.s0, and .p0.s1 was quite an
adventure.  Luckily, a printconfig revealed that the objects names had
a leading ^S.  

So, I am back to my original problem.  How do I create a new plex and
then attach it to a existing volume AND have the new plex's data
synchronized with the existing (good) plex.  This would seem like a
crucial part of a volume management system, otherwise recovery from a
disk failure might be impossible.

Any suggestions?





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Stephen Corbesero                         This message brought to you by
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