ccd or gmirror

[Nerve]

Looking at getting my NAS server mirroring it's two 500GB Seagate drives. The FreeBSD guide talks about setting up ccd but I've heard mention of gmirror. Does anyone know what the differences are or could point me in the direction of a comparison or review.

Thanks.

[Nerve]

Found this: http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/

Seems to indicate that gmirror is the new kiddy. I'll get on and try that then.

[phatfish]

Ive used gmirror for a while on a server box. Never had it tested in an actual failure, but its easy as hell to setup. A couple of commands and your good to go pretty much. No reason to use anything else as far as i know.

[phoenix]

The FreeBSD 5+ methods for disk management are all based on GEOM. The currently available modules include gconcat, gstripe, gmirror, graid3, and gjournal, with a graid5 module in development.

Things like ccd, vinum, and other things that don't start with g, are all deprecated and falling into the bit-rot pile.

[Nerve]

Thanks for the confirmation. That's the one I have tried and yes I agree it looks pretty simple to setup. The problem I've had though has been with setting up the partitions. For adding more drives it seems a mite complicated. First pitfall was the fact that sysinstall fails when trying to mount the disk but apparently this is normal! Now I have to figure out what to put in /etc/fstab. Anyway that's where I stopped so I'll carry on reading up on the next hurdle but at least I'm learning :confused: :mad: :rolleyes: :)

[phoenix]

Don't use sysinstall after the system is installed. sysinstall should be used only for installing the OS. Once that's done, use the OS tools for everything and ignore sysinstall completely.

A google search for "gmirror how-to freebsd" turns up a lot of hits. Here are a couple of the nicer ones:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html
http://lantech.geekvenue.net/chucktips/jason/chuck/1175552464/index_html

[Nerve]

Some articles do mention using sysinstall post configuration menu but I'd prefer to learn how to do it from the command line so I will focus on that.

Yea I've seen those articles, once I get the drives set up gmirror will be easy!

Thanks.

[phoenix]

Send the author of those articles a hint to stop advocating the use of sysinstall for anything beyond installing the OS. :) The more people that harp on that point, and the less people use sysinstall after installation, the better off we'll all be (and the fewer people will complain about the loss of such features in the new FreeBSD installers).

[Nerve]

Should I mention it to these guys?

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/disks-adding.html

;)

[phoenix]

Yes. You should open a PR about it. :) They should be using the port of the sysinstall fdisk editor instead of the full-blown sysinstall. :) (Using sysinstall like that, for the graphical fdisk, is the only good reason I have ever seen for using sysinstall, but then I found the port sysutils/sfdisk.)

[corey_james]

Send the author of those articles a hint to stop advocating the use of sysinstall for anything beyond installing the OS. :) The more people that harp on that point, and the less people use sysinstall after installation, the better off we'll all be (and the fewer people will complain about the loss of such features in the new FreeBSD installers).

+1 +1 +1

i'm glad someone besides me is saying this!