I had a disk drive fail while running RAIDframe. The system did not survive the failure. Even worse there was data loss.
The system was to be my new web server. The system had 1 Gig of memory. I was working, slowly, on configuring apache and web pages. Moving to a chroot'ed environment was none trivial. The disk drive died, the system crashed, and the system rebooted and came up. Remove the dead disk and replacing it with a new disk and reestablishing the raid was no problem. But why was there a crash, I would of thought that the system should run after a disk failure. And even more to my surprise, about two days of my work disappeared. I believe, the disk drive died about 2 days before the crash. I also believe that RAIDframe did not handle the disk drive's failure correctly and as a result all file writes to the failed drive queued up in memory, when memory ran out the system crashed. I don't know enough about OpenBSD internals to know if my guess as to what happened is correct, but it did worry me about the reliability of RAIDframe. I am now trying ccd for my web pages and ALTROOT in daily for root, I have not had a disk fail with ccd yet, so I have not determined whether ccd works better. Neither RAIDframe or ccd seems to be up the quality of nearly all the other software in OpenBSD. This statement is also true of the documentation.
