Subject: Re: another RAIDframe oddity....
To: Greg Oster <oster@cs.usask.ca>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 10/31/2003 19:14:29
[ On Sunday, October 19, 2003 at 15:13:37 (-0600), Greg Oster wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: another RAIDframe oddity.... 
>
> "Greg A. Woods" writes:
> > BTW, is there any easy way to change the "Last configured as" value in
> > the component labels? 
> 
> Not easy.. no.  (as in, no way to do it directly from raidctl)

Hmmm.... another issue arose yesterday where this would also come into
play, and where it's a lot less "cosmetic" than my initial situation.

I had to move a RAID set from one host to another.  Now since the drives
were hot-swap I was able to move them without rebooting.  However once I
had them attached to the new system I had no way to autoconfigure them.
Simply triggering autoconfiguration again, if there were a way to do it,
would have caused a "collision" with the existing RAID set's device.

I think it makes sense to consider supporting hot swap of whole RAID
sets between systems.  I think this means that besides having some way
to re-trigger the RAIDframe autoconfiguration procedures there also
needs to be some way to manually inspect the on-disk component labels of
arbitrary specified disks, and there needs to be some way to adjust the
"last configured as" name in those labels so that a "new" RAID set can
be brought safely on-line without a reboot.  Of course already
configured devices must be ignored when autoconfiguration runs too.
There may be other issues, but that's what comes to mind initially.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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