UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

In my infinite lack of wisdom, I brought a Solaris 10(Sparc, 64 bit ) system down to init 1, detached a metadrive so that I could run format->analyze->refresh on it, and then reinit'd and reattached it .

It started syncing the drive as it's a submirror of a mirrored drive, which happens contain the filesystem for a production application.

Ideally, I would have rebooted the system to get the application back up before re-attaching and resyncing, but I did not.

Would it by safe to reboot the system while the submirror is rsync'ing? Or do I have to wait until it is done?

As far as I know it doesn't matter , If I were in your shoe I'll Just wait until resync finishes.

Probably not a good idea.

I waited, the question was more for a "next time this happens..." situation.
Thread closed.

yes you can but not recommended.

you don't need to reboot to bring it back to runlevel 3. just run init again

Hmm what happens if you ctrl-C a copy, cp operation( just to use an analogy)? it is probably the same when SDS/SVM runs a sync, block by block copy from source to destination (one sub-mirror to another sub-mirror), assuming RAID 1 here.
So if you stop the copy, the source is not getting affected, so you are left with the good data on the source side. Well the destination will have half cooked data which is not going to be of any use.

And when you run boot on the ok OBP prompt, I don't think OBP has any knowledge or understanding the SDS/SVM disk, so it will read the boot block off the physical drive path to get a start. The md driver is loaded once the kernel loads them in the boot process. So what happens if the first boot disk is the one that has the half cooked data from above, it ain't going to boot . You still would be able to boot from the other good disk.

So, there was the technical how and why , which is always different from the decisions you have to make based on the risk you want to take...in the end the question remains, is it worth doing to go through the trouble , probably not. So let it finish what it is doing. Sometimes the benefits of waiting outweigh the risk of being hasty.

Correct me if I am wrong or stated a fact wrong. I would be happy someone reviewed this and provided some commentary on the above,

Check the documentation on the Volume Read and Write polices. You won't have "half cooked" data if setup properly.

The OP did not specify that the drive is a boot drive. Did I miss something? Even if it was a boot drive it would still work if setup properly. There was no technical reason to bring the system to runlevel 1. The power of mirroring or other types of RAID is that it can be done on a live system. If its a big disk the resync will be slow regardless of the runlevel.

That being said I would not reboot it but the OP can run init 3 to bring it back to multi-user level without a reboot.

my .02