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Old 18th May 2009
sherekhan sherekhan is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Norway
Posts: 7
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Thanks for the replies so far, especially jggimis insight

Regarding RAID: I do have a couple of computers in the house used for file servers, printer sharing, media streaming etc, but they are currently not powered 24/7. That means they are not suitable for daily backups at the moment, although that may change. But they _do_ have RAID. It`s a messy combination of RAID1, RAID5 and LVM using disks of different sizes, and the I/O-performance sucks, but the redundancy works. I have parity or mirrors for all data at all times, including GRUB and /boot. The servers are running Debian and Ubuntu atm, but I am considering looking into something with ZFS, maybe FreeBSD or Nexenta. I am also considering upgrading my mail server, and setting up some kind of disk mirroring on a new OpenBSD installation. RAIDframe or ccd? RAIDframe looks like the best and most reliable option from what I read, but it also seems to require a lot of planning and work to set up. Especially if I need a custom kernel every time I upgrade OpenBSD on the box.

Regarding boot media for recovery: Failing to find anything that has already been baked that fulfills my need, I feel that I am left with two options: 1) Make my own live CD with everything I need, and 2) use something that is _not_ OpenBSD. Following jggimis links there are tutorials and hints on how to make your own live CD, and I may end up doing this no matter what just for the experience, but I am still curious about option 2. I am currently typing this post from Frenzy, which is a live CD based on FreeBSD. It seems to have the tools I need (gzip/lzop/lzma, openssl, NFS, network support, man pages and even a basic desktop environment with Opera, plus a wonderful selection of forensics and system tools). What I am not certain about is file system compatibility and bootloader.

I have mounted a partition created with OpenBSD from Frenzy, and it seems to work just fine, including read/write, but can I be certain that a UFS file system created with FreeBSD will work 100% with OpenBSD? What about support for ccd or RAIDframe devices? FreeBSD has ccd, but I have no idea if the implementation and the tools are compatible with OpenBSD. And a Google search on "freebsd raidframe" suggests that RAIDframe on FreeBSD is dead.

Then there is the boot loader. Is it possible to restore this without "proper" OpenBSD boot media? Is it just a matter of using dd to make a backup of MBR, and restoring MBR with dd when required, or is there more to it? Or can I simply install the FreeBSD boot loader (or another boot loader for that matter) and use that to boot OpenBSD?
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