[DRBD-user] Invalidate

Stephan Rattai srattai at zmnh.uni-hamburg.de
Thu Aug 4 12:12:39 CEST 2005

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


> you are very sure that you did not create a DRBD with internel meta data
> over an existing file system without shrinking the fs first, thus
> destroying the last 128 MB of the fs, and corrupting it badly?

Yes, I am very sure, I got external metadata. The filesystem has been existing 
for a few weeks now. There's one thing that *might* have gone wrong due to my 
stupidity- I bonnied the underlying device on each machine (obviously I 
stopped drbd before) to measure the performance of the underlying device. I 
am pretty sure I invalidated the one I bonnied on while the the other node 
primary thus syncing it in the right direction. Yepp, the logs tell me that I 
synced them fully and in the right direction. I have to look deeper into it.

> you are very sure you don't have bad ram or a bad southbridge or
> some other kaputt hardware ?

Hmm, pretty sure but who knows. I was going to run memtest over it anyway. 

> > After this the machine locked up. Fscking it didn't help. Now I thougt
> > I'd try Ext3 and see how it performs. Mkfs stuck.
>
> stuck? or just very slow? (mke2fs is _very_ slow on large devices).

Good question. It might just have been very slow- I just see that the 
underlying raid is rebuilding itself as a result of the crash which isn't 
exactly helping either.

>
> we disallow invalidation of a Primary for obvious reasons.
> you only can invalidate a Secondary.

That makes sense. Sorry for bothering. The mixture of me staring at the 
message "Only in 'Connected' cstate possible." while also looking at a 
connected resource mixed with my stupidity was just too much.

> you can invalidate the Secondary from the Primary by saying
> "invalidate_remote".
>
> but why would you want to invalidate?
> what do you expect this to solve?

That's also a good question. I wanted to start from scratch and tell both 
nodes to forget about their metadata. I might as well have zeroed them but 
then I got stuck with the 'need to be connected' confusion. I just wanted to 
know everything is really at zero. 

Now I know this isn't the best way- I just made both secondary, invalidated 
them and ended up with an oops on one of them. Shouldn't it just be 'I don't 
have access to the good data' or so ?



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