Just had a problem with softraid on a 4.6 box. No, I don't ask to solve
it, it needed urgent replacement, and so I did.
What I would like to ask for, is advice on best practices for softraid
under OpenBSD, to prevent similar things from happening again; getting
hints on how to set it up better, and mostly: how to recover it better.
What happened, was that some slices in a softraid simply went away after
some power surge.
In detail: sd1 and sd2 were set to RAID, and the ensuing RAID1 (sd3)
sliced up into a number of /usr/, /var, /home/, /var/www, /var/mail, swap.
After the reboot after a power surge, two of the slices (/var/mail, sd3g
and /home, sd3h) were simply unavailable, couldn't be 'mount -a'-ed at
reboot, and the system fell back to '/' only being mounted (on sd0).
Strangely, though, disklabel sd3 showed the slices, as sd3g, sd3h. But
they could not be accessed at all; and were not visible under /dev/.
Still, an unexpected bahaviour as far as I am concerned, even more so
since sysctl and bioctl showed an 'OK' and 'Online' softraid.
I tried a few things, like fsck_ffs on these two disappeared slices, as
well as the 'good' ones. The good ones were good, also with fsck_ffs -f.
But the two gone missing were just not available (as devices). Then I
made, I guess, a big mistake, and instead of ripping out one of the
drives, I bioctl -d -ed sd3; leaving 2 drives with RAID file system on
them. Over.
Now, please, any suggestions on how to do better next time something
like this happens?
Thanks in advance,
Uwe
- softraid - best practice? Uwe Dippel
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