..//..

I don’t know if anyone who reads this actually cares, but while I was initially taken back* by vinum‘s non-functionality on FreeBSD 5.4, it turns out that gmirror is quite a bit snazzier and thus far seems far, far easier to use. I’m also looking forward to combining it with gstripe to do RAID0+1 once I have the ability to hook four large disks up to this machine all at once.

gvinum exists as a replacement for vinum which hooks into geom, but it isn’t documented very well yet, and (at least in this case) I can’t see a reason to use it.

If anyone is interested in giving it a try, this simple series of steps shows just how easy it is to get a geom/gvinum-based mirrored root disk is. Gone are the days of installing to one disk then using this to bootstrap two more with vinum, a faked disk label with an ‘a’ partition that overlapped the vinum partition, etc.

After this finishes writing the mirror to the second disk I might try the standard tests… Pulling a disk, bringing it back into a sync’d mirror, etc. Or maybe I’ll go to bed.

At least this is getting done.

* I gave up on things for almost a week, thinking I had some weird hardware quirkyness because every other time I’d do a ‘vinum start’ the machine would dump core.