gmirror kinda sucks.

So, in advance of upgrade day (Saturday), I stopped at the colo this evening for a quick 5 minute hard drive swap. The intent: Swap the boot drive, so as to have a offline seperate bootable disk that we can fallback to if the upgrade sucks.

Unfortunately, the moment I removed one of the two drives that acts as the mirror for gigo.com, I/O froze on the system, entirely. Poof.

After I reset, the system did not want to boot. I broke the mirror, and the first drive of couse was the one I removed. Getting it to boot without the mirror was impossible - booting /dev/ad4 instead of /dev/mirror/gm0 wasn't happening, since the boot drive was told to forget about being gm0.

After a lot of hassle I got the system to the point where it would start fsck'ing. The beauty of this is, is the other mirrored file system was checking itself, end to end, while trying to fsck. after 3 hours, I aborted it, and let the rest of the system come up.

Backups won't run tonight - that's the file system I'm fsck'ing now. Everything else is back to normal.