natacontrol mirror install (was: New dragonfly installation questions)

[Cory Smelosky]

On Sun, 22 Jun 2014, Cory Smelosky wrote:

> On Sun, 22 Jun 2014, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>
> D'oh.  Forgot to ask the really important question: can DragonFly be 
> installed to a software RAID device?  I assume I'd need to label the disks by 
> hand, install the bootloader on one (or both) and have a separate /boot 
> partition...then from there on use natacontrol to RAID the partitions taking 
> up the majority of the disk?
>
>

Okay,  I answered my own question.

I followed http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/docs/howtos/howtosoftwareraid/ 
but substitued the disks it used for ad0s1b and ad1s1b after creating a 
/boot partition.

I also manually labelled ad0 and ad1...did manual boot0cfg, too.

I then did an install and fed it ar0 as the install device (shame I HAD to 
create a /boot partition there...but I wasted 128M.  No big deal.)

I then cpdup'd /boot from the livecd to /dev/ad0s1a mounted at /mnt, set 
vfs.root.mountfrom="hammer:/dev/ar0s1d" in loader.conf, and modified fstab 
to have /boot on ad0s1a instead of ar0s1a.

Issues that still exist:
1). Making this easier from the installer for people who don't want to do 
the crazy hacks I did.
2). Swap is spread across the mirror...which won't be too fast...but I 
don't intend to swap on 16G RAM anyway. ;)
3). I need to test this beyond 5 minutes in qemu.

Looks like the OS of choice for the new box is gonna be DragonFly. ;)

(Also: I'm gonna go take a look at the installer code to see if I can't 
try and simplify this)

-- 
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects