Geomirror raid1

[brcisna]

Hello All,

pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE  x 3

Been using pfSense for about 3 years now, at three different buildinsg in a school envioirment.
2 days ago had an hd  (sata)  failure. I had a spare cloned drive setting in the spare bay of this server but thought I should do the right thing and  do a raid1 setup (which I should have done from the get go).
Of course the setup was very simple in the pfSense install. I wanted to test if unplugging each HD would in fact still boot from the only existing HD.

First I unplugged the 'higher number" HD in the bios sata port number and boot the pfSense machine,,,it booted fine,,and I did see the lines referring to' destroying mirror". At this point I shut off the server,,,then plugged that HD in,,,and unplugged the "lowest sata port" drive and tried rebooting off the HD I had previously unplugged.
It booted up until the dreaded 'mountroot' message.
I am guessing I should have rebooted with the first disconnected drive,, drive connected and let the  raid array 'rebuild' and the boot process would have went ok,,with both drives?

I was in a scramble to get this machine back online I didnt do as much R&D with this as I should have.

Can anyone comment on if either of the two hard drives fails in a geomirror raid1 arrangment the machine will continue to boot without any user intervention?
Sorry for the long post

take care,
Barry

[jimp]

it sounds like you may have still been referring to only one drive in /etc/fstab rather than referring to the mirror as a whole. That's the only reason I can think of why it might have done that.

[brcisna]

Hi jimp,

Thank You for the reply. I am fairly certain the reason the machine failed to boot off the 'first drive' / highest number bios sata port, that i disconnected,, on purpose,was due to the fact the first drive was marked as off line,as you said,,in the fstab.
I should have booted the machine with booth drives connected,,  let the mirror array reubild then shut down and then disconnected the 'second drive" then booted on the first drive i disconnected , i am fairly certain the machine would have booted with no probs..

This scenario is hard to explain the sequence?:)..

After I rebooted the pfSense machine , after having reconnected both drives,,i looked every few minutes and had solid HD activity for about 20-30 mins until what i guessing the raid array was done 'rebuilding'(on 80gb sata drives).

In the dashbord geomirror widget i am seeing 'complete' in the raid setting. yeah!

Take Care,
Barry