freebsd stable - May 2019 - ZFS...

Pete French wrote on 2019/05/03 11:55:
> Oddly enough I got bitten by something like this yesteray. I have a 
> machine containing an HP P400 RAID controller, which is nice enough, but 
> I run ZFS so I have made the drives all into RAID-0 as being as close as 
> I can get to accessing the raw SAS drives.
> 
> BSD seems them as da0, da1, da2, da3 - but the RAID controller oly 
> presents one of them to the BIOS, so my booting has to be all from that 
> drive. This has been da0 for as long as I can remember, but yesteday it 
> decided to start using what BSD sees as da1. Of course this is very hard 
> to recognise as da0 and da1 are pretty much mirrors of each other. Spent 
> a long time trying to work out why the fixes I was applying to da0 were 
> not being used at boot time.
I had this problem in the past too. I am not sure if it was on Dell or 
HP machine - controller presents first disk only in the boot time so I 
created small (10 - 15GB partition) on each disk and use them all in 4 
way mirror. Cannot say if it was gmirror with UFS or ZFS mirroring. The 
rest of the each disk was used for ZFS RAIDZ.
> ( Having to use Windows XP to talk to the iLo due to browsers dropping 
> support for the old ciphers doesnt help either, what do other people 
> with oldish HP hardware do about this ? I know its off topic, but theres 
> a lot of it out there... )
I have WinXP guest in VirtualBox exactly for this situation. With old 
browser, with old Java, with Flash - believe it or not, Cisco UCS C200 
has remote management created in Flash!

Miroslav Lachman

On 03/05/2019 13:11, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> I had this problem in the past too. I am not sure if it was on Dell or 
> HP machine - controller presents first disk only in the boot time so I 
> created small (10 - 15GB partition) on each disk and use them all in 4 
> way mirror. Cannot say if it was gmirror with UFS or ZFS mirroring. The 
> rest of the each disk was used for ZFS RAIDZ.
Snap :-) Thats exactly what I have done - but the bits you cant mirror 
are the GPT partititons for bootcode. I was fiddling with hose of da0 
without realising it was now using da1 to boot. If it ever chooses da2 
or da3 then I will need to mirror it there too, so I have it partitioned 
like that, but am currently using those as swap as it shows no signs of 
wanting to boot from them for now.
> I have WinXP guest in VirtualBox exactly for this situation. With old 
> browser, with old Java, with Flash - believe it or not, Cisco UCS C200 
> has remote management created in Flash!
Heh, yes, I can believe it. I too have XP in VirtualBox. Maybe thats 
just the best solution to this after all.

cheers,

-pete.