Storage

OpenBSD Worrying RAID

I wanted to move a couple of USB hard drives from one OpenBSD machine to another. They are configured with softraid(4) as RAID 1 (mirrored). When I plugged the drives into the new machine though, nothing happened with softraid. This was pretty worrying.

Both the drives showed in dmesg output so the issue was specifically to do with softraid. The man page for bioctl(8) talks about -c creating a “new” RAID device which sounded a little too destructive. I asked for help in #openbsd and apparently the language in the man page is misleading. The -d flag has recently been updated to say “detach” rather than “delete” to try to address this.

Hard drive failure in my zpool 😞

I have a storage box in my house that stores important documents, backups, VM disk images, photos, a copy of the Tor Metrics archive and other odd things. I’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that it is both reliable and performant. When I was working on a modern CollecTor for Tor Metrics recently, I used this to be able to run the entire history of the Tor network through the prototype replacement to see if I could catch any bugs.

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz