Subject: Why my life is sucking.
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org>
List: current-users
Date: 01/15/2001 12:53:42
So, I've been experiencing some "problems" in my life as owner of netbsd
systems.  First things first, 'lager', my life-on-disk machine is a Sparc
running 1.4C.  It's had impressive uptimes and hasn't had many problems
except for dying disks.  Since I can't afford to be buying replacement 
SCSI disks, I decided to buy a PC with cheap IDE disks.

I bought an ABIT with 800Mhz Athlon and 2 45G IBM IDE disks that I 
intended to raid1 together.  In conjunction with my DLT drive on 
an Adaptec controller for backups.  Coupled with a PC Weasel, it was
supposed to improve my quality of life.

This whole situation has turned bad on me and I have no idea how to 
proceed and I'm losing confidence in NetBSD as a system.

The first problem came when I raid1'd the two partitions together.  Every-
thing performs admirably except when it comes to extracting something 
like pkgsrc.tar.gz.  mkdir(2) calls consume 3500 I/O's and take 17 seconds
to complete, most of the time:

	nlager# time mkdir foo
	0.0u 0.6s 0:17.72 3.8% 0+0k 3687+7io 0pf+0w

I've ruled out 'bad disk' because the work is all being done on either one
or the other of the two disks.  ie: it makes no difference.

The kernel in question is a GENERIC 1.5 with the raid stuff linked in. The
userland is also generic 1.5 from ftp.netbsd.org.

I've discussed this with Greg and he has no further ideas.  He's sanity
checked my configuration however.

The second problem came when I installed a 10G disk and tried to duplicate
the OS and /home onto the disk using "dump | restore".  I actually used
"restore -i" because I wanted to exclude my massive mp3 library.

Here's a transcript.  Note: /mnt is a freshly newfs'd 10G partition.


dump 0f - /dev/rraid1a | ( cd /mnt ; restore -if - )
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Sun Jan 14 08:22:42 2001
  DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch
  DUMP: Dumping /dev/rraid1a (/) to standard output
  DUMP: Label: none
  DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
  DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
  DUMP: estimated 21834567 tape blocks.
  DUMP: Volume 1 started at: Sun Jan 14 08:26:47 2001
  DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories]
  DUMP: 0.25% done, finished in 32:40
  DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files]
restore > 
restore > add *
restore > cd usr/local
restore > del cd
restore > extract
  DUMP: 0.40% done, finished in 184:24
  DUMP: 8.13% done, finished in 9:15
  DUMP: 17.81% done, finished in 4:10
  DUMP: 27.62% done, finished in 2:35
  DUMP: 37.41% done, finished in 1:47
  DUMP: 47.28% done, finished in 1:17
  DUMP: 57.15% done, finished in 0:55
  DUMP: 67.08% done, finished in 0:38
  DUMP: 76.99% done, finished in 0:25
  DUMP: 86.46% done, finished in 0:13
  DUMP: 88.92% done, finished in 0:11
  DUMP: 89.41% done, finished in 0:11
  DUMP: 91.09% done, finished in 0:10
  DUMP: 92.35% done, finished in 0:09
  DUMP: 93.98% done, finished in 0:07
  DUMP: 95.92% done, finished in 0:05
  DUMP: 96.70% done, finished in 0:04
  DUMP: 96.90% done, finished in 0:04
  DUMP: 97.74% done, finished in 0:03
  DUMP: 98.82% done, finished in 0:01
  DUMP: 21835714 tape blocks
  DUMP: Volume 1 completed at: Sun Jan 14 10:55:45 2001
  DUMP: Volume 1 took 2:28:58
  DUMP: Volume 1 transfer rate: 2443 KB/s
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Sun Jan 14 08:22:42 2001
  DUMP: Date this dump completed:  Sun Jan 14 10:55:45 2001
  DUMP: Average transfer rate: 2443 KB/s
  DUMP: DUMP IS DONE
Changing volumes on pipe input?
abort? [yn] n
Changing volumes on pipe input?
abort? [yn] n
Changing volumes on pipe input?
abort? [yn] n
Changing volumes on pipe input?
abort? [yn] 
^Crestore > setmodes
set owner/mode for '.'? [yn] y
restore> quit
nlager# cd /mnt/sbin
nlager# ls -al | wc -l
      75
nlager# cd /sbin
nlager# ls -al | wc -l
      83
nlager# cd /sbin
nlager# ls > /tmp/1      
nlager# cd /mnt/sbin
nlager# ls > /tmp/2
nlager# diff /tmp/1 /tmp/2
47d46
< mount_ufs
51d49
< newfs
57d54
< poweroff
60,62d56
< rdump
< rdump_lfs
< reboot
67d60
< rrestore
75d67
< swapon


I've duplicated this 3 times and each time the same files don't get copied. I
illustrate with /sbin as an example but the lossage is everywhere.  My 1G
/home partition is different by about 100MB between /home and /mnt/home.

Also, from dmesg, everytime I mount a filesystem:

	Non-unique normal route, mask not entered<3>Non-unique normal route, mask not entered<3>Non-unique normal route, mask not entered


Not sure what that's about.