vinum or gvinum

[Tomas Palfi]

Hi all,

I am still struggling to set up a one way mirror on two 72GB disks on
5.4 intel platform, however, there seems to be a lot of confusion about
what to use in the first place. this is vinum v gvinum. I have managed
to get to the point where I can fsck all volumes, however when rebooting
the box would not come back giving me this:

vinum: loaded
vinum: no drives found
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/gvinum/root
setrootbyname failed
ffs_mountroot: can't find rootvp
Root mount failed: 6

Tried to configure the same with gvinum replicating the vinum.conf,
however, still nothing. You know, when you are creating the vinum
volume in bsdlabel and offsetting it with 16 blocks giving it vinum
format, do you change this for gvinum as well??? my config would not
have it, I can save it?

I also tried the geom_vinum_load="YES" in the /boot/loader.conf,
however, should I have vinum.autostart="YES" there as well for the
gvinum?? On another occasion I have edited /etc/rc.d/vinum changing the
start_cmd to "gvinum start" - nothing happened???

Also in the vinum.conf file that I laboriously create each time I try,
is the

drive Master device /dev/da0s1h

with the h which is the slice which I create in the bsdlabel or is it
the device name /dev/da0s1a for the root volume?? Non of it worked for
me.

Help me out from here please. This is supposed to be a production
server and I have spent two days on it already.

Tomas

--
tp

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[Stijn Hoop]

Hi,

First: do _NOT_ use vinum on 5.4, use gvinum.

On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 12:43:01PM +0100, Tomas Palfi wrote:
> I am still struggling to set up a one way mirror on two 72GB disks on
> 5.4 intel platform, however, there seems to be a lot of confusion about
> what to use in the first place. this is vinum v gvinum.

gvinum. Just to be safe you could move the vinum command and kernel modules
out of the way.

> Tried to configure the same with gvinum replicating the vinum.conf,
> however, still nothing.

Did you start from scratch by wiping the former configuration without loading
gvinum?

Use

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1m count=128

to be sure. Do this WITHOUT loading any of the vinum modules.

> You know, when you are creating the vinum
> volume in bsdlabel and offsetting it with 16 blocks giving it vinum
> format, do you change this for gvinum as well??? my config would not
> have it, I can save it?

I don't understand this. Here is my gvinum.conf for my mirrored system
at home:

%%%
drive pain device /dev/ad4s1e
drive panic device /dev/ad6s1e

volume root
plex org concat
sd length 192m drive pain
plex org concat
sd length 192m drive panic
volume swap
plex org concat
sd length 2080m drive pain
plex org concat
sd length 2080m drive panic
volume usr
plex org concat
sd length 6g drive pain
plex org concat
sd length 6g drive panic
volume var
plex org concat
sd length 256m drive pain
plex org concat
sd length 256m drive panic
volume local
plex org concat
sd length 0 drive pain
plex org concat
sd length 0 drive panic
%%%

Be aware that gvinum's configuration syntax only allows the short forms
for many keywords.

/dev/ad4s1 and /dev/ad6s1 have this label:

%%%
[stijn@firsa] <~> sudo bsdlabel ad4s1
# /dev/ad4s1:
8 partitions:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
a: 393216 281 4.2BSD 0 0 0
c: 156249009 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit
e: 156248993 16 vinum
%%%

> I also tried the geom_vinum_load="YES" in the /boot/loader.conf,
> however, should I have vinum.autostart="YES" there as well for the
> gvinum??

No, vinum.autostart is for legacy vinum.

> On another occasion I have edited /etc/rc.d/vinum changing the
> start_cmd to "gvinum start" - nothing happened???

Don't do that, it's not necessary to edit anything in /etc/rc.d.

> Also in the vinum.conf file that I laboriously create each time I try,
> is the
>
> drive Master device /dev/da0s1h
>
> with the h which is the slice which I create in the bsdlabel or is it
> the device name /dev/da0s1a for the root volume?? Non of it worked for
> me.

Use only vinum BSD partitions for gvinum drive declarations.

> Help me out from here please. This is supposed to be a production
> server and I have spent two days on it already.

Keep at it until it makes sense, that's what I did. There are a lot of
concepts to get until it clicks.

HTH,

--Stijn

--
My server has more fans than Britney.
-- Steve Warwick, from a posting at ques...@freebsd.org

[Stijn Hoop]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 01:59:27PM +0200, Stijn Hoop wrote:
> Did you start from scratch by wiping the former configuration without loading
> gvinum?
>
> Use
>
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1m count=128
>
> to be sure. Do this WITHOUT loading any of the vinum modules.

:( Forgot to add a big fat warning: ==> this hoses your system if you do this
on your system disk of course <==!

--Stijn

--
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

[Tomas Palfi]

Hi,

I thought I could check previous gvinum config with the gvinum> list
command in its own shell. When I run this command for either gvinum or
vinum, they both reported no volumes. Also I noticed that you have IDE
hard drives, whereas I have SCSI, would that matter?

Thank you

Tomas

--
tp

--Stijn

_______________________________________________________________________

This e-mail has been scanned by Messagelabs
_______________________________________________________________________

[Stijn Hoop]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 01:20:47PM +0100, Tomas Palfi wrote:
> I thought I could check previous gvinum config with the gvinum> list
> command in its own shell. When I run this command for either gvinum or
> vinum, they both reported no volumes.

You should be able to use the list command to view the configuration. It's
just that I'd start with a clean slate so to speak.

> Also I noticed that you have IDE hard drives, whereas I have SCSI, would
> that matter?

Not that I know. To gvinum, they're just drives.

By the way, you can also consider geom_mirror, for which an excellent
article is available here:

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

Both gvinum and gmirror approaches are able to boot from a mirrored system
disk. It depends on other factors which one you choose.

> Thank you

No problem.

--Stijn

--
Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already
know dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be
killed.
-- G.K. Chesterton

[Tommi Lätti]

On 8.9.2005, at 21.26, Stijn Hoop wrote:

> By the way, you can also consider geom_mirror, for which an excellent
> article is available here:
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/
>
> Both gvinum and gmirror approaches are able to boot from a mirrored
> system
> disk. It depends on other factors which one you choose.

I have to vouch for gmirror system. I have three production machines
here running and booting from gmirror on since 5.3-REL and they're
all doing fine. Even after I upgraded 5.3 -> 5.4 and during the first
boot I saw the "updating metadata" -message. Made me sweat for a few
seconds.

--
br,
Sty

[Michael Butler]

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Tommi Lätti wrote:

| I have to vouch for gmirror system. I have three production machines
| here running and booting from gmirror on since 5.3-REL and they're all
| doing fine. Even after I upgraded 5.3 -> 5.4 and during the first boot
| I saw the "updating metadata" -message. Made me sweat for a few seconds.

I have a similar experience with gmirror in the second configuration (by
slice) descibed on that web-page. Swap is the first slice which is not
mirrored and the second slice contains the bootable file-system which is
mirrored. Just sits there and works - which is how I like 'em to be ;-)

Michael
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[Tomas Palfi]

Stijn,

I think I am almost there as the disks are now sincing. Thank you for
your help, it has been really appreciated. I am still going fiddle with
the mirror with the gvinum.

Tomas
--
tp

-----Original Message-----
From: Stijn Hoop [mailto:st...@win.tue.nl]
Sent: 09 September 2005 12:12
To: Tomas Palfi
Subject: Re: vinum or gvinum

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:04:42PM +0100, Tomas Palfi wrote:
> Thanks for this update, I am configuring the gmirror as per the
> instructions, however, there is one thing which bothers me a bit.
>
> bsdlabel -e /dev/mirror/gm0s1 when editing the new layout, it
> advices me to start "a" partition at offset 16, and "c" as per default
> at offset 0. do I have to retain the offset 16 for the "a" partition
> where my root is located or can i have another offset + 16 and start
> swap at 0 offset? In this case the swap would start with offset 0 as
> "b".

Sounds fine. In the past there have been troubles with old BIOSes not
booting from root partitions that were located "far" on the disk (>2G
I believe). I don't think that limitation exists anymore, but keep it
in mind. Other than that, FreeBSD will be happy.

> this is my exiting layout on /dev/da0s1
>
> a: 10485760 10485760 that's /root
> b: 10485760 0 swap
> c: 143363997 0
> d: 20911520 20911520 /home
> e: 14680064 41943040 /tmp
> f: 14680064 56623104 /var
> g: 72060829 71303168 /usr/local
>
>
> and this is what I would lay it as on the /dev/mirror/gm0s1
>
> |-|-----|-----|-----------|--------|--------|--------------------|
> 16 swap /root /home /tmp /var /usr/local
>
>
>
> a: 10485760 (10485760 + 16) that's /root
> b: (10485760 - 16) 16 swap
> c: 143363997 0
> d: 20911520 20911520 /home
> e: 14680064 41943040 /tmp
> f: 14680064 56623104 /var
> g: 72060829 71303168 /usr/local
>
> in this case the swap would be offset by those 16??

Yes, I would definitely offset things by 16 sectors. I don't really know
what's stored there but you don't lose much and it probably makes sense.

Also keep in mind that you need to make sure that /dev/ad0s1 does NOT
cover the ENTIRE disk, but rather leaves a few sectors spare at the
end. This is to make sure that gmirror does not confuse /dev/ad0 and
/dev/ad0s1 as providers for the mirror (it stores it's metadata in the
last sector). All of this is described in the article, although maybe
not very clear. Note also that by default, FreeBSD leaves a few sectors
spare when runnign fdisk, so it's not an issue most of the time unless
you 'dangerously dedicate' your disks.

Hopefully it'll all work out today ;-)

--Stijn

--
It's harder to read code than to write it.
-- Joel Spolsky,

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

[David Magda]

On Sep 9, 2005, at 07:31, Michael Butler wrote:

> Swap is the first slice which is not
> mirrored and the second slice contains the bootable file-system which
> is
> mirrored.

What happens to a running system if the disk dies and swap suddenly
disappears? :)