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ZFS/slices & VNC [Oi_151a]

T

taroumaru

Weaksauce
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Joined
Dec 22, 2005
Messages
89
Three questions:

NOTE: installed napp-it [& having its own set of problems, but hopefully it has nothing to do with #1]

#1 I cannot login to the OI server [using VNC] if there are no active/logged in users! I can remote into the server if currently there is a logged in user [say if desktop was locked], so I know VNC works & is setup properly.

What can I do to make VNC work even if there is no logged in users [with locked desktop]; otherwise the whole remote desktop thing is useless, as I'm unable to remote into the server after a reboot [since there are no logged in users]!

#2 How do I create/format individual disks with ZFS [JBODs], without having any parity/being in any fault tolerant [mirror, Z1/2/3] pool?

#3 How do I add additional slices to the boot disk & add those to a separate mirrored+striped pool [different from the root pool/rpool]?

I have two 120GB & 2 80GB disks. I used one of the 120GB as the root/boot drive with a 40GB slice, then I mirrored the slice onto the second 120GB drive [including GRUB & booted from it].

Now, how do I setup a second [80GB] slice on the two 120GB, then mirror them together? How do I create 80GB slices/partitions on the remaining two 80GB drives & mirror them, then stripe across those two sets of mirrored slices/partitions in a separate [from rpool] pool?

Code: 
__________________________________________________________
           |               |              |              |
         120GB           120GB           80GB           80GB
rpool <- slice1-+mirror+-slice1
         slice2-+mirror+-slice2         slice1-+mirror+-slice1
pool2 <- ---+---------------+---stripe-----+---------------+--

Thanks.
 
Almost a month & no one has even replied to this post; guess either it can't be done or no one knows [ha ha].

Anyway, I've done it; just be careful you get the right slice number when creating another pool using the OS drive, otherwise the OS partition/slice can be overwritten/corrupted!
 
Sorry that your question seemed to fall through the cracks, were there any issues you still have not resolved from your original post?

In case you still need assistance with any of this, as for question #2 i think i may be able to help.
You do not technically format an individual disk with ZFS, what you would do is create a zpool with a single vdev consisting of one disk, such as

zpool create risky c0t0d0

where the name of the pool is "risky" and disk is c0t0d0, if you wanted to create effectively a raid0 of several disks with no parity you would state

zpool add risky c0t0d1

where the pool is "risky" and the second disk is c0t0d1, this would stripe all subsequent writes across the two devices

For question 3, you would use the friendly utility 'format' (you would have to look up the commands elsewhere, i've only used it a few times). We will be making a lot of assumptions here (such as disk 1 slice1 appears as c0t0d0s0, disk 1 slice 2 is c0t0d0s1, disk 2 slice 1 is c0t0d1s0, disk 2 slice 2 is c0t0d1s1, disk 3 is c0t0d2, disk 4 is c0t0d3, and zpool named stuffpool) but to get the configuration you were asking about i would use:

zpool create stuffpool mirror c0t0d0s1 c0t0d1s1 mirror c0t0d2 c0t0d3

that would allow you to expand stuffpool later by replacing the two 80GB disks with larger disks, or adding another vdev

Just remember that when asking for assistance people may complain about your use of slices as raw storage rather than passing whole disks to zfs.
 
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Dalfo002, thank you so much for the post; though I have solved all 3 problems. After all I've had almost a month [ha ha]!

I just wanted to stripe the drives for testing purposes, so that later on I could compare to other types of raid. Matter of fact I've posted the results in this thread: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1677243
 
Not spending too much right now, as I've already spent over 3k on chassis & other components. Waited 7-8 months for drives, until 2 weeks ago, when I got 6 3TB for less tha $650; half turned out the be enterprise class while the other half are the latest 1TB platter ones! Actually I needed 12 to start, still, was a bargain compared to the drive prices being astronomical as they are right now.

So I have an old ECS G31T-M board, an Intel Pentium E5500 [or something similar] & 4GB of ram [not even ECC!]. It'll do for now with just the 6 drives. Heck this board doesn't even have a gig ethernet card; had to get an Intel GT.

OI/Sol has a vnc server, but its called xVNC & its disabled by default. Wasn't too difficult to configure & enable the service. But anyways as I installed text version of the OS, I no longer need xVNC; just ssh into the server from a remote terminal.

By the way, even with a text install, as in no desktop manager, you can still get xVNC by installing gdm [required for xVNC to work] with pkg install slim_install. And after you've gotten everything setup & running, do a reboot, then pkg uninstall slim_install [to get rid of any extra packages not needed]!
 
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taroumaru said:
Three questions:

NOTE: installed napp-it [& having its own set of problems, but hopefully it has nothing to do with #1]

#1 I cannot login to the OI server [using VNC] if there are no active/logged in users! I can remote into the server if currently there is a logged in user [say if desktop was locked], so I know VNC works & is setup properly.

What can I do to make VNC work even if there is no logged in users [with locked desktop]; otherwise the whole remote desktop thing is useless, as I'm unable to remote into the server after a reboot [since there are no logged in users]!
Click to expand...

It sounds like VNC is not set to startup with the system I don't know what vnc server you are running, but here is a page with setup info for tightvnc http://www.abdevelopment.ca/blog/start-vnc-server-ubuntu-boot
 
mwroobel, thats exactly what it was, it was just diabled. Also, SOL/OI comes with xvnc.
 
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