gvinum musings

Over the weekend I decided that I needed more space on my development system.

I have a "spare" Compaq disc chassis and 9 x 18.2GB Drives in it. Now, I needed more than 18.2GB of space, because I want to host both 5.x and 6.x source trees for FreeBSD, as well as some sundry Net/BSD trees AND my own projects. If only I had a spare PCI RAID controller.

But I didn't, and I'd read about vinum on FreeBSD for a while now. This looks like a good time to give it a try.

Unfortunately, I don't think the handbook is all the clear. www.vinumvm.org is your friend here, because it has some more thought out examples.

Secondly, FreeBSD has support for both Vinum and GVinum (geom vinum). Some more knowledgable person can no doubt tell me they are based in the same place, but I found that no matter what I did with vinum the disk configurations would not be readable after a reboot. gvinum on the other hand, was... Looks like gvinum is the way to go.

There's another catch... Nowhere in the handbook did it really make clear what to put in the disklabel information. Originally I had them raw (it worked, but corrupted the hell out of itself on reboot), "4.2BSD" (didn't recognise the disk when I ran fsck)

I stumbled across another entry somewhere that said "make sure you mark them as "vinum". Eureka! 127GB of RAID5 storage is online and serving away under NFS.

Thus far, performance is very acceptable with the small number of clients I have hitting it.