On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 5:13 AM, Stuart Henderson <s...@spacehopper.org> wrote: > On 2011-04-29, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nka...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Stuart Henderson <s...@spacehopper.org> >> wrote: >>> On 2011-04-29, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nka...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> So, I'm looking for recommendations. Modest 1U pizza boxes? >>> >>> R210? (as long as you don't need externally accessible disks.) >>> >>>> Even brand >>>> names for known-good PCI or PCIe SATA controllers would be helpful, >>> >>> LSI >> >> Thanks for the thought. I was unclear: I wanted the model name, not >> the manufacturer's name. I've had...... harsh experience when some >> components by a particular vendor work well, but others do not. And >> even model names can be *very* confusing when a vendor deliberately >> has a name on the box that doesn't match the spec sheet that doesn't >> match the BIOS reported component name. (Dear lord, don't *get* me >> going on the old 3com network cards and the "Mega[notworking]RAID" >> cards of various vintages. > > Anything supported by mpi(4) mfi(4) or mpii(4) should be ok (covering > all the hardware raid options on dell boxes should work). Out of these > mpi and mfi are more widely used, so will have had more testing. > For older hardware ami(4) is ok too but it sounds like you're > looking for something new.
I was hoping for model numbers. Now that I'm up with software RAID, I can take ktime and look to the future for hardware RAID. The software RAID basically took me 2 days poring through documents and details. I'm still writing up my notes to submit to the current guideline maintainer. (The originals are very good notes!! I'd love to see them linked to directly on the OpenBSD faq, or incorporated there. B, but I can make some steps safer.) >> I've actually spent a bit more time and gotten software RAID working >> and will send some updates to the authors of the very helpful software >> RAID guidelines that I found. > > The only _maintained_ software raid on OpenBSD is softraid(4), that > has only just recently had code written to allow booting from it and > it's not committed yet. Really? The notes at http://www.eclectica.ca/howto/openbsd-software-raid-howto.php are for OpenBSD 3.7. > For what you're talking about using the machine for, I'd be much > happier with a single disk than an unmaintained software raid setup. > And if there's a choice between two (carp'd?) boxes with single disks, > or one box with raid, two boxes would be hugely preferable. I'm inclined to agree, for personal experience reasons. I've done a lot of "high availability" setups, and hardware failures have been one of the *least* of the sources of failures. Configuration screwups, especially for feature filled and highly tuned setups, have been far more of a risk. There are other reasons not put more boxes in the relevant rack right now. So, in the longer term, I'll be pursuing that. I might even virtualize it: I've got OpenBSD 4.8 running very well under VirtualBox and reasonably well under KVM right now, except for some bridge configurationi reasons, and could consider VMWare.
