Gentoo+Ultrasparc+software RAID - proceed or go to NetBSD?

smiffy

Despite my love of Portage, I am wondering whether I made a mistake wiping Solaris off my Ultrasparc box, although Solaris - for me - has more annoyances than I can count. (My hardware is too old to run Solaris 10.)

I may be complicating things by the fact that I am trying to use software RAID; due to certain disasters in the past, I will NOT have anything to do with machines that do not run RAID in anything but a test environment.

Having overcome my problems getting silo to run,
a) I am unable to boot at all, other than with the CD
b) despite having copied my mdadm.conf to another machine, then pulling it back into /etc in the livecd environment, doing mdadm -R /dev/md0 just gets me a 'no such device' (and the device nodes are there).

In another thread, a comment along the lines of "don't do software RAID on sparc" came up.

Am I trying to do something unachievable|too difficult to be worthwhile and, if so, should I be looking to NetBSD to run this box and revisit the Gentoo approach when it works as well as i386?
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Matthew Smith

sblaineyuk · n00b Joined: 27 Oct 2005 Posts: 34

have you tried

smiffy · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 10:00 am Post subject:

I hadn't wiped it and installed NetBSD - the boot disc doesn't recognise my PS/2 keyboard! Doh!

So, fired up the CD and tried to set up, but got:

Yarrick · Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 7:15 am Post subject:

I use md raid on linux 2.6 on ultrasparc without any problems.

This is how i got it to boot using silo:
http://kryo.se/e250/sparcraid.txt

smiffy · Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 7:43 am Post subject:

Thanks for telling us!

Having tried NetBSD and Solaris 10 (never even finished the install), I went back to Gentoo, but with only the one disc.

I have just won a Sun Blade 100 on eBay. When I receive it, I will be putting in a pair of 80Gb Deskstar discs and will give Gentoo/RAID1 another try.

Then I can have "fun" getting Solaris 10 on my old box ;-)

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Matthew Smith

smiffy · Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 2:34 am Post subject:

Yarrick's brief HOWTO worked well for me. Thanks for that.

I had other issues, but am now just plagued with the baselayout bug (fs checks now disabled on boot). See also: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3530541.html
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Matthew Smith

Toady · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 7:31 am Post subject:

I have had Software RAID 1 working fine on an Ultra 10 - I honestly cant remember how I did it so it cant have been that painfull.
It wasnt quick (using the SUN IDE controller - gawd thats slow) but it did work ok.
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Toady

Gentoo Laptop
3.1.10-gentoo-r1, Intel Core 2 Duo (32bit)
Gnome on the desk, Intel in the box, on-board everything, but it all works!

smiffy · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 8:27 am Post subject:

Should have posted before - emerge -uD world fixes baselayout issue with 2.6.x kernel.
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Matthew Smith