Using AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) (Plan 9 wiki)

This is primarily aimed at users of Coraid devices.

CONSOLE ACCESS

On Coraid devices, access is possible via the usual PC keyboard, mouse and video, or the serial port, or cec(8). Typically, invoking

cec /net/ether0

cec '#l1/ether1'

will produce a menu of Coraid devices by MAC address, and you choose one.

You may have to (once only) first type this on your Coraid console:

cecon /net/ether0
cecon /net/ether1
cecon /net/ether2

PROVISIONING LUNS

Once connected to the console, you can partition the available disks into Logical Units (LUNs). We'll assume a shelf number of 1 in these examples. If yours is different, use it in place of `1'.

First declare some drives to be used as hot spares:

spare 1.13-14

To create a big RAID 5 LUN, you would type something like this:

make 0 raid5 1.0-1.10
online 0

which will create LUN 1.0 from drives 0 through 10 of shelf 1. This may take hours to finish, but you can use the LUN immediately.

For single-drive LUNs, you would type something like this:

make 1 raidl 1.11
online 1

which creates an un-RAIDed LUN of drive 11 of shelf 1.

CLIENT CONFIGURATION

The stock kernels all include devaoe and sdaoe, so you shouldn't need to build a new kernel.

Adding these lines to your plan9.ini or /cfg/pxe file should cause AoE to be enabled automagically at boot time, per sdaoe(3):

aoeif=ether0
aoedev=e!#æ/aoe/1.0

This assumes that your Plan 9 system has a single Ethernet interface. If you have several, choose the one that your AoE device is on. `1' is the shelf number of the AoE device. `1.0' is the logical unit you're interested in. `æ' is Unicode 00e6. `e' is the controller letter you'd like to use for logical unit 1.0.

After your next boot, you should see a lightly populated /dev/sde0. Running `diskparts' should make any partitions visible.

An AoE LUN appears to be a single large disk, often too large for the usual Microsoft partition table to address because it would require sector numbers greater than 2^32, so we skip the Microsoft partition table (the one maintained with disk/fdisk) and just lay down a Plan 9 partition table with

disk/prep /dev/sde0/data