[DRBD-user] Initializing shortcut

Martin Fick mogulguy at yahoo.com
Wed May 10 18:50:35 CEST 2006

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.



--- Lars Ellenberg <Lars.Ellenberg at linbit.com> wrote:
> in drbd8, we have the command drbdmeta, which is
> much
> more flexible and powerful than write_gc.pl .
> it has commandline parameters to initialize the meta
> data, or dump/restore it to some ascii
> representation.

Cool.

 
> > Afterall there is a period in time when
> > there is no metadata on the partitions and drbd
> has
> > decided that it is OK to initialize the partition
> > (--do-what-i-say).
> 
> this option is seriously misunderstood, too.
> it has been renamed to "--overwrite-data-of-peer",
> to
> better express what it actually does.

Yes, I like that!  I once had to write a script to
restore an entire system from backups, I called it
destroy_machine since that is what it actually did if
you had anything on it. :)


...
> > At this point in time it surely
> > would be no worse to use an algorythm that simply
> > shortcutted the syncing process would it?
> 
> what, if you had an existing single-server setup
> with
> existing data, and you extend it with drbd to form a
> cluster, so you have existing filesystems with
> important data on it?
> is it ok to skip the initial sync there, too?

Umm, no?  Drbd would know that though right, since it
would find existing metadata on the single server
partition?


...
> but then again, once we implement the online
> verification, we would _need_ to have this initial
> sync, because the drives _have_ to be bitwise
> identical
> (thats one of our "guarantees", after all).

Ah, but that's where my intial zeroing suggestion
would help.  While it might take some time to zero a
whole paritition (on both sides), there would be no
network tranmissions required... vastly faster than
syncing.

Please don't take any of this the wrong way, this is
by no means something that I *need*, and I certainly
do not want to suggest comlicated stuff.  I think that
this would be rather simple and safe and I figured I'd
suggest it to see if it others thougth that it really
would be safe and simple,

-Martin


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