Fresh install on gmirror'ed disks?

[Peter Jeremy]

I think the FreeBSD approach is fairly typical - you get the OS running
and then mirror it.

On Fri, 2006-Mar-03 10:43:26 +0000, John Hawkes-Reed wrote:
>From what I remember, the Solaris installer is fairly pretty and works well, 
>while the HP example is somewhat messy. The mirroring instructions for both 
>those OSes assumed you'd a working system first.

For software RAID (Solaris DiskSuite aka Volume Manager, Tru64 LSM),
both Solaris and Tru64 require you to install the OS first and mirror
it later.  For hardware RAID, you would typically use a stand-alone
RAID configuration tool before installing the OS.

I found the Solaris 10 installer looked pretty but I was presented
with a set of several hundred packages with (as far as I could find)
no immediate indication of dependencies.  This made the installation
somewhat trial and error:  Pick a collection of packages that looked
useful/relevant.  Move forward a few steps and get told that package
SUNWfoo needs package SUNWbar.  Go back to package selection and fix
that.  Iterate multiple times.

>I'm also not sure that the onward march of disk-size is strictly relevant. 
>Were I building a PC-based RAID, I'd make sure I bought an 
>appropriately-sized spare disk at the same time as the rest of the set.

Solaris requires that all disks in a RAID set have the same firmware
version (though this isn't documented very well).  Tru64 requires that
both system disks have the same SCSI disk type.

-- 
Peter Jeremy