Re: clearing Vinum configurations

From: aarong (aarong_at_megapathdsl.net)
Date: 10/15/03

  • Next message: Greg 'groggy' Lehey: "Re: clearing Vinum configurations" 
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 22:45:02 -0700
To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>

    Firstly, let me extend my utmost thanks for helping me these past few
    weeks, Mr. Lehey. Staring down the barrel of a Political Science major,
    your coding has made me rethink my decision to steer away from a
    Computer Science degree.

    On Tuesday, October 14, 2003, at 10:04 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

    >
    > I'm going to need more information on this. It doesn't correspond at
    > all with my experience. Here's an example:
    > ...

    I found my problem, I would obliterate a configuration and not
    saveconfig. It is my experience that resetconfig will obliterate only
    the configuration currently read into memory, and NOT clear the Vinum
    configuration written to Vinum disks - in my case da0 and da1. If I
    omitted saving the config after resetting, Vinum would read the
    previous configuration (after reboot) on the drives and start all over
    again. I have conquered this problem only to come to another perplexing
    Vinum problem.

    On another box, again 4.8-RELEASE only with IDE instead of SCSI drives,
    I completed setup and began to mirror. Without thinking I tried to add
    plexes on an uninitialized drive and as such, Vinum read the new device
    name beta, but listed the drive in a state of referenced. I initialized
    the drive per Handbook instructions, copied the disklabel from ad0 to
    ad3 (drive beta) and tried again. After successfully starting each new
    plex, I saved the config, double checked the config written to both
    disks with dumpconfig, and rebooted. Upon reboot I was back to square
    one. I've replicated this three times now. Did you know it takes 2
    hours two completely mirror a 69GB slice across two IDE drives? ;-)

    What I find VERY interesting is that ad3, hence known to vinum as
    "beta", has the correct dumpconfig output: all plexes are "state up"
    and everything is kosher. Drive "alpha", aka ad0, has the incorrect
    original config where I accidently tried to create plexes on an
    uninitialized drive. All *.p1 plexes are "state faulty" on "alpha" and
    all the saveconfig's in the world don't seem to be changing this. I, of
    course, have diligently searched the mailing lists looking for anyone
    with a similar problem, only to find another guy who didn't initialize
    the second drive correctly but then promptly fixed it.

    Why would the two drives have differing configurations? Why can I
    remove all the faulty plexes, subdisks, and the "referenced" state beta
    drive; re-add beta and create new plexes; start them; save the config;
    have everything run fine; only to lose it all after rebooting?

    Once again I retreat to my reference box here next to me for more
    testing tomorrow.

    >
    >> 2) why doesn't dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 seek=16 count=265 work?
    >> What's in those 265 sectors that I can't touch?
    >
    > The second sector on the disk is protected. You can't write to it.
    > If you start at sector 2, it will work.
    >
    > The Vinum label is at sector 8. That's the only sector you need to
    > clear to manually obliterate a Vinum configuration.

    Then the command should look something like: dd if=/dev/zero
    of=/dev/da0 seek=18 count=263 ? Sector eight after the sixteen sector
    bootstrap, correct?

    Again, my utmost thanks.
    -aarong

    >
    > Greg
    > --
    > When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients.
    > If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original
    > recipients.
    > For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html
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    > <mime-attachment>

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  • Next message: Greg 'groggy' Lehey: "Re: clearing Vinum configurations"

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