I'm running a p9p venti server under Linux using several
(small by current standards) physical drives as my arena
pool. I got a 500GB external USB drive to use as a backup
of the arenas. But here's the gotcha. The number of blocks
per cylinder on the 500GB drive isn't the same as the other
smaller drives. So, I can't create a partition that's exactly
the same size as one of the smaller drives, which means that
the last arena is a different size when I format it. mirrorarenas
complains about that and considers it fatal. I modified
it so that if the destination arena is bigger than the source,
it's just a warning and not fatal and it's happily mirroring
as we speak. But I've got a couple of questions:
- Is this going to cause any problems?
- Is there a better way to handle this?

Thanks,
BLS

So here's what I ended up with. I installed 9vx on
the machine and used that to partition the big
drive: one fairly big partition with 4 subpartitions
for the 4 arena disks already on the machine. The
p9p mirrorarenas didn't like the partition name
notation. It calls initpart which calls parsepart
which seems to only like the numeric range notation.
But running the Plan 9 mirrorarenas in 9vx works
just fine. So I'm pretty much where I want to be
for now.

Thanks,
BLS