Informations about gmirror / geom-mirror integration?

[srynoname]

I am interested in installing pfSense on a software RAID 1. However the only information I could find about this is that the installer supports it (http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Create_a_Software_RAID1_%28gmirror%29). I couldn't find any information about the integration of the raid support into pfSense:

1. How about monitoring RAID status from the webinterface? how about email notifications?
2. How about replacing a failed disk - just plug in the new disk or do I have to run some commands (according to http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/geom-mirror.html I have to run some commands, but maybe it's better integrated in pfsense?).
3. Any disadvantages over a real RAID controller? (except for performance, which I don't care about as there isn't relevant disk access from within pfsense)

etc.

Thanks for any hint!

[jimp]

We had most of that info on the doc wiki, not sure why it was removed.

I added it back. http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Create_a_Software_RAID1_%28gmirror%29

[srynoname]

thank you jimp,

somehow I didn't get a mail notification, so I saw your reply just now. Are there plans for extending the RAID support, e.g. mail notification, spare disks and just needing to insert a new drive that gets automatically used/added as spare? I don't know if that's possible, but as RAID 1 mirrors everything, shouldn't it be also possible to mirror to some kind of loopback device, so one can create a complete image of the pfsense installation while it's running for backup purposes? :-)

[jimp]

not sure what the plans are there.

Eventually we'll have a more full-featured notifications system but that won't be ready any time soon. When that happens, notifying of a mirror failure would be possible.

Not sure about mirroring to a loopback device or anything like that, that's all up to gmirror. We can't really automate a lot there safely.