sparc 64 - 5.1-RELEASE - - fdisk - bsdlabel - vinum

[vezku at surfeu.fi]

Hi folks,

I've been testing vinum on 5.1-RELEASE (sparc64) and have a few questions.
I believe the problem is sparc64 specific.

System: SUN 250E (2 x sparcII CPUs)

da0: <SEAGATE ST39103LCSUN9.0G 034A>
*FBSD installed on this disk, no probs there

da1: <SEAGATE ST336605LSUN36G 0638>
*dedicated disk to use for /home mirror

da2: <SEAGATE ST336605LSUN36G 0638>
*dedicated disk2 to use for /home mirror

QUESTION 1)
Howto partition and label da1,da2 correctly for vinum?
Step-by-step please, because I tried every freakin way.

test1:
First I tried sysinstall which created da1d and da2d with UFS2/UFS (tested
both) successfully. Some bugs must exist because the new bsdlabel prog
didn't recognize these labels:
bsdlabel: /dev/da1: no valid label found

Anyways I continued and built the vinum module. Then I configured the volume:

1)
drive drive1 device /dev/da1d
drive drive2 device /dev/da2d
 volume home setupstate
  plex org concat
    sd length 34710M drive drive1
  plex org concat
    sd length 34710M drive drive2

2)newfs /dev/vinum/home (tried both UFS/UFS2 with/out softupdates)

Everything seemed okay until I rebooted. I have start_vinum="YES" in
rc.conf. Still /dev/vinum/home file had disappeared and plexes were not
up.
I has a similar prob in 5.0 but then I hadn't used sysinstall correctly.
Now it's not the case.

test2:
Second I tried the manual way, but didn't find fdisk (not available for
sparc64?) so only was to follow Dedicated disk method (read comments):

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=1k count=1
$ bsdlabel -rw da1 auto
$ bsdlabel -e da1  # here u can define fstype vinum, is it okay?
$ newfs /dev/da1e  # this didn't work because no such device file exist
                   # i understood fdisk creates devices but howto do it
                   # without fdisk?

Thanks for any input. If I get it right I'll write in depth document
available for all...software-RAID is such low-level service it needs to
work 100%.

-Vesa, SysAdmin