Howto do SW RAID?

[Olaf Greve]

Hi Mike and Ian,

Firtsly: thanks a lot for your answers; they're very much  
appreciated! :)

Then some specifics:

>>
>> Some questions:
>> 1-The BIOS lists it as having a Pentium 4 processor that mentions
>> being EM64T compatible, so I think the AMD64 version should be the
>> best choice, right?

 >I'd say yes - I've been running a P4 that way for about three years
 >now, but there may still be some things for which ix86 might be a
 >better choice. Most commented on is probably that the nvidia
 >proprietary video drivers don't (yet) work on amd64 FreeBSD
 >builds. I'm perfectly happy with the OSS ATI drivers, but others
 >aren't.

Roger that! As for video performance... As long as it can handle text  
mode, I'm o.k. with it. ;)
The machine will only be used as a web and back-up server, so X will  
not even be installed by me.

Now for the more tricky decision:

Ian wrote:

>
> http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html

And Mike wrote:

 >If you're willing to run a little bit experimental, zfs is a much
 >nicer storage solution in general:
 >https://www.ish.com.au/solutions/articles/freebsdzfs

I must say, ZFS sounds very cool, yet.... the experimental thingy  
attached to it is somewhat off-putting at present. I noticed a remark  
about the kernel memory tuning possibly being hasslesome. I'm not  
exactly certain what to do best at this point in time, but perhaps  
that can best be decided by looking at what this very installation  
will have to do. At present, the anticipated use of the machine, is to  
become my fallback server for the primary one. That means that it will  
nightly rsync files from then primary one, as well as the MySQL DB  
instances running on it, and some other data I want backed up to the  
fallback machine. Performance (i.e. speed) is not the main key  
indicator, but stability and realibility are, as is -possibly-  
easiness of restoration when a drive fails completeley or partially.
I've read the pages you both refer too, and it seems ZFS has good  
capabilities for disaster recovery, as well as automatic healing and  
snapshots. It certainly sounds like something to experiment with, but  
I'm not certain if now is the best time to do so.
I still have to read the gmirror man pages to see what would be  
involved in disaster recovery, so I'm not certain yet if that's  
trivial or not.
Hmmm, tough call...

Meanwhile: can anyone comment om these points? Any hands-on experience  
with either, perhaps?

Cheers!
Olafo