Jarred Masterson
Cadet
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2012
- Messages
- 7
I am setting up a FreeNAS box that will boot from CF cards which are attached to the host via a SATA to CF adapter. I have purchased two of these with the hope of creating a mirror so that if something were to happen to one of them then I wouldn't suffer any down time. This box will serve a host of iSCSI targets that will store VM images (or the iSCSI disk could be the virtual machine's physical disk, I'm going to do performance testing to decided if theres a benefit). Given this purpose I am working to minimize downtime as much as possible and mirroring the boot disk seems like the low hanging fruit of increasing my "9s". Right after redundant power supplies!
So my problem is this. I used the SuperMicro server board's bios to enable the intel RAID controller, and then configured it to place both of those CF drives into a mirror. This all seems good! I then shut off the FreeNAS box and then pulled the CF cards and used the physdiskwrite program to write them embedded image to them. I used a USB CF adapter to do this, don't know if it matters. I then replaced the CF drives and powered on the box. I checked the intel RAID config and it reports that still has one mirrored volume being exported to the BIOS and both CF cards display as being members of the "disk".
So everything looks great. But when in FreeNAS I can see a 8 GB disk reported as ada1. I know that FreeNAS isn't supposed to show the FreeNAS boot volume so I logged into the shell and ran the following command: egrep 'ada[0-9]' /var/run/dmesg.boot
Sure enough! As the result below depicts, the FreeNAS/FreeBSD subsystem sees both CF drives despite the config being set to export only one, and the BIOS reporting that it is booing off an Intel RAID volume. My question is now obvious, WTF is going on!!! Am I crazy?
ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <CF 8GB 20101008> ATAPI-0 device
ada0: 150.000MB/s transfers (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO 512bytes)
ada0: 7647MB (15662304 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 15538C)
ada1 at ahcich1 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0da3 at mps1 bus 0 scbus1 target 3 lun 0
ada1: <CF 8GB 20101008> ATAPI-0 device
ada1: 150.000MB/s transfers (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO 512bytes)
ada1: 7647MB (15662304 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 15538C)
So my problem is this. I used the SuperMicro server board's bios to enable the intel RAID controller, and then configured it to place both of those CF drives into a mirror. This all seems good! I then shut off the FreeNAS box and then pulled the CF cards and used the physdiskwrite program to write them embedded image to them. I used a USB CF adapter to do this, don't know if it matters. I then replaced the CF drives and powered on the box. I checked the intel RAID config and it reports that still has one mirrored volume being exported to the BIOS and both CF cards display as being members of the "disk".
So everything looks great. But when in FreeNAS I can see a 8 GB disk reported as ada1. I know that FreeNAS isn't supposed to show the FreeNAS boot volume so I logged into the shell and ran the following command: egrep 'ada[0-9]' /var/run/dmesg.boot
Sure enough! As the result below depicts, the FreeNAS/FreeBSD subsystem sees both CF drives despite the config being set to export only one, and the BIOS reporting that it is booing off an Intel RAID volume. My question is now obvious, WTF is going on!!! Am I crazy?
ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <CF 8GB 20101008> ATAPI-0 device
ada0: 150.000MB/s transfers (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO 512bytes)
ada0: 7647MB (15662304 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 15538C)
ada1 at ahcich1 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0da3 at mps1 bus 0 scbus1 target 3 lun 0
ada1: <CF 8GB 20101008> ATAPI-0 device
ada1: 150.000MB/s transfers (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO 512bytes)
ada1: 7647MB (15662304 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 15538C)