Software RAID in FreeBSD

FreeBSD provides a helpful tool to manage software RAID with ATA deivces. This tool provides features such as hot swapping ATA RAID devices, which was previously unheard of. This functionality and features will be elaborated here.

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gmirror - recovering from a failed HDD

I like RAID. On my development server, I use both hardware and software RAID. For hardware RAID on FreeBSD, I like 3Ware. For software RAID, I tend to use gmirror, because I don't need more than RAID-1.

Some time ago I added two 120GB HDD to this system. One was SATA, one was PATA. They were joined together via gmirror. Tonight I received some errors that one of the drives was failing. I replaced the drive, and recovered the mirror. I'll show you what I did, mostly so I know what to do the next time it happens, but also so you can see what to do as well.

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Software RAID1 on FreeBSD

Since 5.3-Release, FreeBSD has gmirror utility, which allows you create software RAID1. So if you have some low-end server and you need some redundancy - gmirror is right choice.

RAID1 creation process is _very simple_ and completely described in gmirror(8) man page, but i will post small how-to here.

Software mirror in FreeBSD

If you want to make a low-cost server with a RAID capabilities and don’t want to invest in a hardware RAID solution, gmirror is a good choice. You can use it to add a disk and create a mirror even on your existing server running FreeBSD 6 or 7.

In my example I have at start an 8 GB hard disk where I installed FreeBSD 7.

RAID, FreeBSD and FreeNAS

Recently I set up FreeNAS on a spare computer which is now serving as a RAID file server. Before setting it up I did some research into what RAID is and how it works.

Software RAID on OpenBSD using RAIDFRAME

Some time earlier I was finding it difficult to get Software RAID [using RAIDFRAME] setup on OpenBSD with just the man pages [raidctl(8)], mailing list archives and few tutorials on the Internet. The concept of boot partition being different from the root partition appeared a bit confusing in the beginning. Then Vijay Shanker gave me this step by step guide which he posted to misc@.

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Building a Fully Encrypted NAS On OpenBSD

In this document I will try to explain what it takes to get an encrypted NAS on OpenBSD. This involves software RAID and encrypted filesystems.