"Felix 'buebo' Kakrow" <buebo@buebo.de> writes:

> Iam just setting up my home server with a mirrored RAIDframe root.
>
> Now I'm not a NetBSD developer and I wouldn't know how to debug a
> kernel crash dump, even if it came after me with fork and knife, so is
> there any reason why I should bother setting up kernel dumps, as it is
> mentioned in the guide [1]?

The only reason is that if you have trouble, you can get a backtrace and
post it, and that may be helpful if you have a problem that others do
not have.

> Is there any other reason or is it save to just use swap inside of the
> raid and not having space for crash dumps?

As the guide says, setting up kernel dumps to overlap with raid swap is
dangerous.  So you have several choices:

1) don't make swap big enough for dumps, and never have dumps

2) make swap big enough, and don't set them up, letting you do it later

3) make swap big enough, and set up dumps

4) put swap not on raid, and make it big enough, and maybe dump on it.
This setup means that a disk error in swap will take your system down,
but if your concern is saving the data and not availability, that may be
ok.  My raid systems are all servers (4) and i have everything in raid
including swap because I want them to keep running if there's a disk
failure.

Given what you said, I'd go for 2 or 4.