I’ve never got on well with software RAID systems on FreeBSD. I’ve tried gvinum (previously I used vinum), gmirror, and ataraid, all with varying degrees of success. The latest machine I built is using gmirror, and so far I’m happy.<\/p>\n
However, over the past few days I’ve been having problems with a system I built a couple of years ago. It originally used vinum on FreeBSD 5.2.1, but I recently upgraded it to 5.5 and switched to gvinum. A week or so ago I noticed that the second disk in the mirror was marked stale – I guessed it was an artifact of the upgrade to 5.5. So on Tuesday I decided to resync it.<\/p>\n
It went fine to start with, until syncing one partition produced a disk read error. This marked the whole original disk as bad, and I’d only half synced to the second disk. Thinking back I knew this disk had an error on, and I’d fully intended to replace it. Shame I didn’t do it at the time. Next I rebooted the machine to recover the disk from dead to stale, so I could force it back online. This is where the problems started.<\/p>\n
GEOM_VINUM: subdisk swap.p1.s0 state change: down -> stale
\nGEOM_VINUM: subdisk root.p1.s0 state change: down -> stale
\nGEOM_VINUM: subdisk var.p1.s0 state change: down -> stale
\nGEOM_VINUM: subdisk usr.p1.s0 state change: down -> stale<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThat’s what welcomed me during bootup. Not too bad I hear you say? Well, that’s all I saw after that – it didn’t boot any further. I tried various things such as unloading the geom_vinum module, booting single user, booting the other disk, pulling one disk, but nothing worked.<\/p>\n
In desperation I booted an older kernel. It worked! Well, when I say worked, I mean it booted past this point and asked me for a root partition – but at least I could work with that. It wasn’t immediately obvious why it had worked; my theory is that it wasn’t the fact it was an older kernel, but that it was a different kernel version to the modules on the disk, making it refuse to load the geom_vinum module.<\/p>\n
So after getting things running again I decided to update to 6.1. I figured help would be more limited when running 5.5, and I could see changes had gone in to gvinum in 6.1. After a few hours this was done, but the result was the same; I booted to single user, typed “gvinum start”, and got the same message. Oddly this time the machine wasn’t entirely dead – I could still reboot it. But maybe this was because I’d launched it manually.<\/p>\n
Regardless of the cause of the problem I’m now stuck. I’ve got everything running off one disk fine, but I can’t get the RAID going. The only possibility I can see is redoing the RAID configuration, but to do this I’ll need to blast the existing config off the disks, and I’m nervous about that.<\/p>\n
The other option I’m considering is replacing the machine and starting again (it’s getting old now anyway). Maybe this time I’ll go for a hardware RAID solution, though \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve never got on well with software RAID systems on FreeBSD. I’ve tried gvinum (previously I used vinum), gmirror, and ataraid, all with varying degrees of success. The latest machine I built is using gmirror, and so far I’m happy. However, over the past few days I’ve been having problems with a system I built a couple of years ago. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-freebsd"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t