Nick, Good point.
Nevertheless, I do believe that software-based RAID -with all its limitations- is still better than just a single disk. Error recovery from failing disks is not trivial, but I guess it still improves your chances to recover information rather quickly, in the cases where you can't afford HW RAID boards. The daily/altroot strategy sounds good to me, but I tend to see it as a backup solution instead of a high-availability solution. In my system requirements, downtime is an issue. Thanks for your feedback. Bdab - Hide quoted text - On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 1:30 AM, Nick Holland <n...@holland-consulting.net>wrote: > B Da Bahia wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I'm a newbie to OpenBSD, and I'm trying to install a new system with all > > partitions (/, et al) on a software RAID 1 discipline. > > > >>From the FAQs, I see that you don't recommend using RAIDframe + ccd for > new > > installs. > > > > But in the softraid manpage, you say that "There is no boot support at > this > > time for any disciplines". > > > > If by any means possible I'd like to have the / partition on RAID 1 as > well. > > > > What leads me to the question: what should I do? > > > > Any tutorials that folks could recommend to have all partitions on RAID > 1? > > > > thanks in advance! > > think about this a while. > > Let's assume you have a PC with a semi-typical BIOS (pretending there is > such a thing). You have two disks, wd0 and wd1. You soft-mirror them. > > wd0 fails, but is still in the machine. Do you really think your BIOS > will magically jump over a dead but recognizable disk to boot off a good > disk? I'd not bet on that. Worse, what if the disk PARTLY dies, and the > system STARTS to boot from wd0? In that case, I can promise you it will > NOT say "oh, that didn't work, let's try wd1". > > Software mirroring of the boot on PCs has some serious limitations in > general (I've seen HW RAID bumble this, too, for what it is worth). > > What are you storing on your root partition that changes so often you > need to have it on a RAID system? > > There are very few places where mirroring the boot partition in software > on a PC-like machine is superior to using the /altroot system that's in > place, and a few places where /altroot is superior to mirroring. > Think of a firewall...you make a change to pf.conf, it doesn't quite work, > you change it back, but can't recall what it was originally...there it is > sitting on your /altroot partition as it was late last night (ok, this > particular example is solvable in other ways too...) > > Nick.
