Comments on: What a Resilver Looks Like in ZFS (and a Bug and/or Feature)

By: Egurzi

Egurzi — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:23:00 +0000

how many compartments and what kind of wood backing and what does it have to do with those orange traffic cones?

By: Benjamin Close

Benjamin Close — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:04:00 +0000

If you want to make it so zfs doesn’t recognise the drive, you have to zero out the area zfs uses to store the drives GUID. Once that’s done you can reuse it in the pool. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde in this case. Then you can reuse the disk. It even tells you this must be done manually:

the following errors must be manually repaired:

/dev/sde is part of active pool ‘media’

Though it doesn’t tell you how to fix it. ZFS pretty much is preventing you shooting yourself in the foot by nuking what could be an active drive.

ZFS also doesn’t care where the disks are, it relies on GUID’s in the meta data it places on the disk. Shift your disks around all you like and it’ll find them where ever they are and reconstruct the pool accordingly. Try running: zdb poolname you’ll see what I mean

By: Rudd-O

Rudd-O — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:58:00 +0000

I’m a zfs-fuse and zfs in kernel developer.

You should add your drives using the /dev/disk/by-id directory. That way the drive will be picked up consistently regardless of the device node in /dev/.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 19:34:00 +0000

I think you can work around this issue for NEW raidz pools. It won’t help with your test pool, but “zpool create” is perfectly happy working with symlinks. Just create something like:
ln -s /dev/sda2 /my-drive2
ln -s /dev/sda3 /my-drive3
ln -s /dev/sda4 /my-drive4

Then create your pool with my-drive2, my-drive3, and my-drive4.

By: Dave Drager

Dave Drager — Mon, 16 May 2011 20:40:00 +0000

In reply to Giovanni Tirloni. Thanks for your feedback Giovanni!

By: Giovanni Tirloni

Giovanni Tirloni — Mon, 16 May 2011 09:42:00 +0000

Wrong. ZFS doesn’t rely on devices being at the same location all the time. In fact, I’ve had to swap chassis and removed all disks, added them in random fashion and ZFS detected everything just fine. With the zdb -l command you can see how it marks each disk.

You should change the title to “What a Resilver Looks like in FUSE-ZFS” because it seems you’re hitting bugs in Fuse’s implementation.

By: Dave Drager

Dave Drager — Sun, 15 May 2011 13:27:00 +0000

In reply to Robbyt. Thanks - will take a look at it. I am probably going to format the system and use FreeBSD as I hear their implementation of ZFS is pretty solid. ZFS on Linux has actually come a long way and has a posix enabled implementation available as of May 5th!

By: Robbyt

Robbyt — Sun, 15 May 2011 13:19:00 +0000

It sounds like your zfs problems are all due to using the beta implementation on Linux. zfs itself is really solid when running on Solaris. You might want to give OpenIndianana a shot.