Geert Hendrickx wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 09:53:17PM +0100, Mark Cullen wrote:
> 
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I am looking to 'upgrade' my little home server from FreeBSD 4.11. I've 
>>got NetBSD 3.0 installed on a test box at the moment (and I must say 
>>it's quite cool once you get used to it), and have managed to get it all 
>>configured how I want it, I think, except for one thing. The box in 
>>question has a vinum RAID-1 array, and I am not sure how I would go 
>>about using this, preferably without recreating it from scratch - if 
>>this is even possible - with alot of backup / restore hassle.
> 
> 
> May I suggest you have a look at RAIDframe, a software RAID implementation
> which is built into NetBSD.  It's very cool.  You'd have to recreate your
> RAID volume though.  
> 
> http://www.netbsd.org/guide/en/chap-rf.html
> 
> 	Geert
> 

Thanks for the link. I was hoping to avoid having to recreate the 
volume, but it looks like I am going to have to :-) I'll tinker about 
with RAIDFrame on the test box and see if I get along with it.

I have just noticed a slight difference with disk device naming too, I 
think. I'm not sure how to word it well, so..

In FreeBSD, the device names are always:

ad0 = Primary Master
ad1 = Primary Slave
ad2 = Secondary Master
ad3 = Secondary Slave

So, if I had the following hardware configuration:

PM = HDD
PS = HDD
SM = CD
SS = HDD

I would always have ad0, ad1 and ad3. It seems that in NetBSD it doesn't 
work like this though. The test machine does infact have the above 
configuration and I get the devices wd0, wd1 and wd2, rather than wd0, 
wd1 and wd3.

This in itself isn't much of an issue, it doesn't really bother me much 
what the device names are so long as I can tell which disk relates to 
which device. However, in the context of RAID, specifically RAIDFrame, 
does this have any consequences? For instance, suppose the RAID array is 
on wd1 and wd2. Now, suppose I decide to replace the CD drive with a 
hard disk, which, I presume, would cause wd2 to then become wd3, and the 
new disk would then be wd2. What happens now? Will RAIDFrame pick up on 
this, or will it try to use the brand new , blank hard disk as the other 
disk in the RAID array?