trying to whack a glabel for a zfs mirror

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 06:00:25PM +0900, Randy Bush wrote:
> > Once again the use of glabel(8) that causes and can cause loss of data
> > within ZFS disks... DO NOT USE GLABEL! it is not a solution that you
> > are looking for and in the long run you will shoot yourself in the
> > foot for using it.
> > 
> > What you are seeing is glabel blatently refusing to write meta-data to
> > parts of the disk where something may already exist. This is a good
> > thing.
> > 
> > In turn use something like gpart(8) to adjust the gpt label and/or set
> > your disks up properly. This is not the same thing as glabel(8) which
> > in turn is a hack and not a solution and severely needs to be shot
> > into outerspace from world.
> 
> i gather you do not like glabel :)
> 
> as you might have guessed from the ad0s3, the disks are gparted.  the
> reason that they are also glabeled is that this is on a disk controller
> from hell, an hpt 16-port, which seems to occasionally renumber the
> drives, for example when one is removed.  so i wanted constant labels.

You can't statically assign the controller ports to individual
indexes/numbers?  An example (on a different controller though, but it
should work regardless of controller though the obvious semantics have
to be changed).

Taken from our /boot/loader.conf --

# "Wire down" device names (ada[0-5]) to each individual port
# on the SATA/AHCI controller.  This ensures that if we reboot
# with a disk missing, the device names stay the same, and stay
# attached to the same SATA/AHCI controller.
# http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2011-March/011036.html
#
hint.scbus.0.at="ahcich0"
hint.scbus.1.at="ahcich1"
hint.scbus.2.at="ahcich2"
hint.scbus.3.at="ahcich3"
hint.scbus.4.at="ahcich4"
hint.scbus.5.at="ahcich5"
hint.ada.0.at="scbus0"
hint.ada.1.at="scbus1"
hint.ada.2.at="scbus2"
hint.ada.3.at="scbus3"
hint.ada.4.at="scbus4"
hint.ada.5.at="scbus5"

IMO, this is a hell of a lot better than dealing with all of this
labelling nonsense that FreeBSD has introduced over the years.  Every
single time I read about it on the mailing lists there is always some
nonsensical complexity or annoyance with it.  I guess some people just
like pain.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                     http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                 Mountain View, CA, US |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.             PGP 4BD6C0CB |