UFS in CF for /boot and Hammer for the rest and failover+load balancing

[Alex Hornung]

Regarding disk encryption, there are basically two approaches now.

One is tcplay(8), which is a TrueCrypt compatible BSD-licensed solution,
but fairly experimental.

The more stable/well tested solution is the GPL-licensed cryptsetup(8),
which is the same as on Linux.

Both use dm_target_crypt underneath and both are fully supported for
cryptdisks(8), crypttab(5) and mkinitrd(8).

Using the initrd approach you can encrypt your / with any of the above
approaches, but /boot needs to be unencrypted.

HTH,
Alex Hornung

On 03/10/11 08:15, Zenny wrote:
> Thank you Justin for a comprehensive reply. Appreciate it!
> 
> I shall check with the vkernel stuffs to limit resources for jails 
> (seems like a sharp learning curve ;-) ) 
> 
> Since you stated that 4 drives are overkill, does hammer allow 
> create a pool like in ZFS of two master drives and two slave drives
> with remote machine which works exactly as a failover + load
> balancing (as in the case of DRBD in Linux or HAST in the coming
> FreeBSD-9).
> 
> Where exactly can find the detailed document for scripting for a 
> streaming the HAMMER data to the remote machines?
> 
> As I stated earlier, I want:
> 
> /boot in CF or SanDisk
> / in HDD and other data
> swapcahce in SSD or in HAMMER /
> 
> in order to separate data from the operating system. But I could
> not find documents for manual installation mode to meet my
> requirements. Let me know if there are any. Thanks!
> 
> On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Justin Sherrill
> <justin at shiningsilence.com <mailto:justin at shiningsilence.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I'm not sure about the jails.  They I think work the same on
>     DragonFly, though the resource limits aren't there.  You could
>     potentially use virtual kernels to get a similar effect.  See the
>     vkernel man page for that.
> 
>     You should be able to set up the root and other volumes normally.  4
>     hard drives may be overkill - you can stream from master to slave
>     volumes in Hammer, for which 2 drives will work.  If you want more
>     duplication, hardware RAID may be a good idea; people have been trying
>     out Areca cards with success recently.
> 
>     AES256 is supported, or at least I see the tcplay(8) man page has an
>     example using it.  I haven't used disk encryption enough to know it
>     well.
> 
>     You can use Hammer to stream data to other machines, and then in the
>     event of something going wrong, promote the slave drive in the
>     surviving unit to master.  This would require some scripting or manual
>     intervention; this isn't covered with an automatic mechanism.
> 
>     On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Zenny <garbytrash at gmail.com
>     <mailto:garbytrash at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > Hi:
>     >
>     > I am pretty new to Dragonfly or BSD world. HammerFS seems to be very
>     > innovative. Thanks to Matt and team for their hard work.
>     >
>     > I would like to do something with Hammer+UFS like the following,
>     > inspired by Paul's work
>     > (http://www.psconsult.nl/talks/NLLGG-BSDdag-Servers/), but could not
>     > figure out exactly:
>     >
>     > 1) Creation of a server with a jail with minimal downtime as offered
>     > by nanobsd scripts in FreeBSD. Two failover kernels. Is there such
>     > scripts for DragonflyBSD?
>     >
>     > 2) I want to have the minimal boot (ro UFS) and configurations like
>     > that of the nanobsd image on a compact flash while the entire root and
>     > data in an array of HDDs (at least 4) with of course an SSD for
>     > swapcache. The latter could be Hammer to avoid softraid.
>     >
>     > 3) All HDDs should be encrypted with AES256 (I could not find whether
>     > DragonflyBSD supports that), and accessible either in the /boot of CF
>     > or somewhere else (could be ssh tunneled from another network).
>     >
>     > 4) I could not figure out the features of jail available for
>     > DragonflyBSD. FreeBSD-9-CURRENT has the resource containers
>     > (http://wiki.freebsd.org/Hierarchical_Resource_Limits). Are they
>     > applicable in DragonflyBSD's case.
>     >
>     > 5) Is there any way that the two similar servers in two different
>     > locations can securely mirror for failover as well as load-balancing?
>     >
>     > Appreciate your thoughtful inputs! Apology in advance if my post above
>     > appears to be pretty naive. Thanks in advance to the entire DF
>     > community and developers!
>     >
>     > zenny
>     >
> 
>