[DRBD-user] Initializing shortcut

Martin Fick mogulguy at yahoo.com
Wed May 10 18:10:05 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:

> / 2006-05-09 11:06:04 -0700
> \ Martin Fick:
...
> > What I mean is that if a device has never had any
> > data on it, let's say the partitions were just 
> > created, allow a startup feature that would not 
> > attempt to sync the two partitions.  In this case,

> > only newly written data to the disks need be 
synced, so as 
> > soon as mkfs or what not is run on the primary it 
> > would sync over the fs layout and continue to 
> > operate as normal.

> yes it is possible.
> no we probably won't make it easier.
> 
> as experience shows, people are very tempted to
> shoot themselves, and
> would even use that option because it is available
> and mentioned in some
> "howto" thing, even if it is not applicable.
> it would initially appear to work ok, then they
> would do a failover,
> complain about fs-corruption and declare that drbd
> had eaten their data...

I understand the desire to have people avoid shooting
themselves in the foot, a goal that I am very glad
drbd takes seriously, but I have to wonder if there
wouldn't still be a safe option for drbd to do this
somehow.  

If  a partition is starting off fresh, can't drbd be
sure of that?  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).  At this point in time it surely
would be no worse to use an algorythm that simply
shortcutted the syncing process would it?



> do skip the initial sync with drbd 0.7.x, you could
> use the write_gc.pl
> program (in the source tar.gz, testing/) and
> initialize the meta data
> with 'consistent' identical GCs on both nodes.

Thanks, I will look into that, but I surely think that
having a separate tool like this is more likely to
make somone shoot themselves in the foot than doing it
safely within drbd itself at initialization.

-Martin


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