On Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 11:02:22AM -0500, Peter Fraser wrote:
> 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.
Crashing IDE drives are likely to confuse the IDE bus; there is little
that OpenBSD can do about this.
There was a thread on RAIDframe vs ccd on misc@ about a month ago;
search the archives. Basically, ccd isn't good for data safety.
I don't think your guess is correct, though - RAIDframe is rather likely
to crash when poked at (with incorrect configurations &c), but otherwise
quite stable.
Joachim
