Re: UFS in CF for /boot and Hammer for the rest and failover+load balancing

[Zenny <garbytrash@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you Justin for a comprehensive reply. Appreciate it!

I shall check with the vkernel stuffs to limit resources for jails 

(seems like a sharp learning curve ;-) ) 

Since you stated that 4 drives are overkill, does hammer allow 

create a pool like in ZFS of two master drives and two slave drives

with remote machine which works exactly as a failover + load

balancing (as in the case of DRBD in Linux or HAST in the coming

FreeBSD-9).

Where exactly can find the detailed document for scripting for a 

streaming the HAMMER data to the remote machines?

As I stated earlier, I want:

/boot in CF or SanDisk

/ in HDD and other data

swapcahce in SSD or in HAMMER /

in order to separate data from the operating system. But I could

not find documents for manual installation mode to meet my

requirements. Let me know if there are any. Thanks!

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Justin Sherrill <justin@shiningsilence.com> wrote:

I'm not sure about the jails.  They I think work the same on
DragonFly, though the resource limits aren't there.  You could
potentially use virtual kernels to get a similar effect.  See the
vkernel man page for that.

You should be able to set up the root and other volumes normally.  4
hard drives may be overkill - you can stream from master to slave
volumes in Hammer, for which 2 drives will work.  If you want more
duplication, hardware RAID may be a good idea; people have been trying
out Areca cards with success recently.

AES256 is supported, or at least I see the tcplay(8) man page has an
example using it.  I haven't used disk encryption enough to know it
well.

You can use Hammer to stream data to other machines, and then in the
event of something going wrong, promote the slave drive in the
surviving unit to master.  This would require some scripting or manual
intervention; this isn't covered with an automatic mechanism.

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Zenny <garbytrash@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I am pretty new to Dragonfly or BSD world. HammerFS seems to be very
> innovative. Thanks to Matt and team for their hard work.
>
> I would like to do something with Hammer+UFS like the following,
> inspired by Paul's work
> (http://www.psconsult.nl/talks/NLLGG-BSDdag-Servers/), but could not
> figure out exactly:
>
> 1) Creation of a server with a jail with minimal downtime as offered
> by nanobsd scripts in FreeBSD. Two failover kernels. Is there such
> scripts for DragonflyBSD?
>
> 2) I want to have the minimal boot (ro UFS) and configurations like
> that of the nanobsd image on a compact flash while the entire root and
> data in an array of HDDs (at least 4) with of course an SSD for
> swapcache. The latter could be Hammer to avoid softraid.
>
> 3) All HDDs should be encrypted with AES256 (I could not find whether
> DragonflyBSD supports that), and accessible either in the /boot of CF
> or somewhere else (could be ssh tunneled from another network).
>
> 4) I could not figure out the features of jail available for
> DragonflyBSD. FreeBSD-9-CURRENT has the resource containers
> (http://wiki.freebsd.org/Hierarchical_Resource_Limits). Are they
> applicable in DragonflyBSD's case.
>
> 5) Is there any way that the two similar servers in two different
> locations can securely mirror for failover as well as load-balancing?
>
> Appreciate your thoughtful inputs! Apology in advance if my post above
> appears to be pretty naive. Thanks in advance to the entire DF
> community and developers!
>
> zenny
>