Re: Installing FreeBSD onto Vinum-volumes?

From: Kirk Strauser (kirk_at_strauser.com)
Date: 07/23/03

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    To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 14:11:31 -0500

    At 2003-07-23T18:21:42Z, Eivind Olsen <eivind@aminor.no> writes:

    > Are you able to have a mirrored root-device (/) with this approach? Or
    > will you end up with having a single copy of / on one drive?

    I end up with a single copy of '/'. However, I partition (both,all) drives
    identically, so that each has a 200MB-or-so slice at the beginning. I use
    rsync from a cron job to make backups of '/' to the starting slice of each
    drive.

    The reasons I do this are that:

    1) Any old FreeBSD boot floppy/CD can read the "mirrors" of '/' in the event
       that the root drive dies, regardless of the state of vinum. Makes
       disaster recovery that much easier.

    2) You get a little bit of versioning for free. Accidentally overwrite
       /etc/master.passwd with mergemaster? Just grab the copy from
       /rootbackup.

    >> Out of curiosity, what offsets have you had to calculate?

    > I've read a bit of a chapter from the 4th edition of The Complete FreeBSD:
    > <http://www.vinumvm.org/cfbsd/vinum.pdf> (or, as text
    > <http://www.vinumvm.org/cfbsd/vinum.txt>). It suggests to install the
    > swap-partition first on the drive, setup a slice for vinum to cover the
    > entire drive and then run bsdlabel and change the offset and size for the
    > swap and vinum partitions.

    Weird. I've never bothered with any of that. I always just call "create"
    with:

      sd length 0 drive myDrive1

    and let vinum calculate the correct sizes. 

    -- 
Kirk Strauser

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