On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 19:31:03 +0100, Peter van Oord van der Vlies wrote:

> Next time we buy them with hardware raid controllers and scsi disks.
> Normally we do that but only this st*pid customers wants this cheap
> systems.

You can certainly do that. RAIDFrame is a usable, software RAID. I
still think you had a config problem of some kind.

I run RAIDFrame -- and run both root-on-raid as well as swap-on-raid. I
set swap up in its own RAID volume. Most critical, I think, is that I
offset the first used sector to LBA 63. The disklabel has to reside
somewhere.

I have had an IDE disk drive fail, and my two RAID sets continued to run.
The hardware was incapable of physical hot swap, but RAIDFrame kept the
system operating until a scheduled maintenance window. (Yes, RAIDFrame
has logical hot swap, but that wasn't applicable in this situation.)

I don't know if your problems were related to offset or not. Here are
two RAID set disklabels: the first is a data volume:

# size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg]
a: 204737 63 4.2BSD 2048 16384 199 # Cyl 0*- 199
c: 69206144 0 unused 0 0 # Cyl 0 - 67584*
d: 2097152 204800 4.2BSD 2048 16384 323 # Cyl 200 - 2247
e: 20971520 2301952 4.2BSD 2048 16384 323 # Cyl 2248 - 22727
f: 45932672 23273472 4.2BSD 2048 16384 323 # Cyl 22728 - 67584*

This second is a swap volume:

# size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg]
b: 3804993 63 swap # Cyl 0*- 3715*
c: 3805056 0 unused 0 0 # Cyl 0 - 3715*


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