How do people install FreeBSD on mirrored drives? Before or after installation?

olav

olav

I've read the manual. And this has become a complex beast to read. There are way too many steps and conditions, it's not a simple and easy task anymore. Is there an easier way to do this? Something you can spend less than 2-3 minutes on? Is it possible to create the mirror from sysinstall?
 
No, it's not possible to create one from sysinstall. You shouldn't use sysinstall any more, it's been deprecated.

Setting up a ZFS mirror might be a little easier. But either way you are going to have to put some effort in.
 
Ok, thanks. I think I will try to write a shell script that simplifies this process for us who do not have too much time between our hands. I guess that should be possible out of what I read in the handbook.
 
It would probably be a little easier to use the Shell mode of the installer to create the mirror, filesystems, and assign mountpoints. Then turn the installer loose on it.
 
SirDice said:
No, it's not possible to create one from sysinstall. You shouldn't use sysinstall any more, it's been deprecated.

Setting up a ZFS mirror might be a little easier. But either way you are going to have to put some effort in.
Click to expand...

I have to say that I tried the ZFS thing first (it's mixed UFS+ZFS, so that might have been it), but I just couldn't get past the issue of the system RAM getting eaten up. I had added 2 disks, so that was the motivation to try it. I ended up doing a gmirror, then felt like I was wasting the disk so I set up a geom stripe. If the ZFS adventure taught me anything, it was to checkout the other options FreeBSD has :).

Brett :stud
 
I've found a solution that is easy and works great, by using graid.
All you have to do during installation is the following.
Step 1:
Select shell when the FreeBSD installer starts.
Step 2:
Type in this command
[CMD=""]graid label ddf gm0 raid1 ada0 ada1[/CMD]
Step3:
Type [CMD=""]exit[/CMD] to return to the installer.
 
That is all you had to do to create a Mirror 1 RAID?

olav said:
I've found a solution that is easy and works great, by using graid.
All you have to do during installation is the following.
Step 1:
Select shell when the FreeBSD installer starts.
Step 2:
Type in this command
[CMD=""]graid label ddf gm0 raid1 ada0 ada1[/CMD]
Step3:
Type [CMD=""]exit[/CMD] to return to the installer.
Click to expand...
 
Could you explain? I've just tested this with VirtualBox so far, and it seemed to work just fine.
 
Check the man pages for detail. gmirror(8) is a software RAID. Drives can be attached anywhere, to non-RAID motherboard controllers or even to different types of buses. graid(8) uses motherboard RAID controllers. It's an interface to the motherboard RAID, instead of software RAID.
 
If you have a decent amount of RAM, these days I'd recommend using ZFS and following this howto:

http://www.aisecure.net/2012/01/16/rootzfs/

By decent amount of RAM, I mean say 8GB or more.

If you're just doing "general desktop stuff", 8GB of RAM will be largely wasted and may as well be used by ZFS, so you can reap the benefits of data checksums, compression, getting familiar with the new technology, etc.
 
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