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Mirroring Questions

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rhpen

Programmer
Nov 2, 2005
40
US
Netware 5.0 SP6A

Not new to Netware, but just learning about mirroring and am curious about the following:

I have a server that had one drive in it. I added second drive, brought up server, load nwconfig, mirrored the original drive to the new one. That seemed to go OK. It re-mirrored and the system is running fine.

One of the reasons for mirroring is when I do an install of an upgrade, I want to break mirror, do the upgrade. If all OK, remirror. If not, switch drives (make the former mirror the primary) and I'm back to the original working system.

As a test I did this (broke mirror) and it asked me do I want to preserve the volume sys information on the mirrored drive. Since the reason I did this was to use the drive in case of a problem with the install, I said yes. I then
got a bunch of error messages to the effect that I have two volumes named sys (well, I assumed I would since that is the very nature of a mirror - everything the same). Anyway, I hit OK and then got a message something to the effect that volume sys is mismatched, starts at sector 0 and ends at sector so and so. I hit OK again and the mirror was broken. At this point is the mirrored drive a valid drive to use if the other one had a bad install and I wanted to get back to my starting point?

After a while, I remirrored. As soon as I added the mirror drive back to the set in nwconfig, I got all these same error messages again about there being two volumes named sys and the sectors not being right. I kept pushing OK til no more messages. The drives re-mirrored and things are
running along fine. Is this mirror set good?

All these messages were very cryptic to me and I really could find no references to them on the internet. At this point I am not sure if the mirroring is OK or not or if I am doing this right or not. The system seems to be mirrored and is running fine, but it doesn't seem right that I should get all these error-type messages when breaking mirror or setting up the mirror again.

Thank You
 
It actually sounds right. However, remember that you are doing a software RAID (Level 1) so that if you are doing this to protect yourself from disk failure, you'll need some way of booting. I found this out the hard way. However, since you're doing this as a form of "backup", I think you'll be fine. The error messages are usually due to files being out of sync as far as their time stamp goes. Netware doesn't like time to be off.

Hardware RAID would be a better solution to this. However, it is more expensive. Good luck.

Iolair MacWalter
Director of IT
 
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