benefit of GEOM labels for ZFS, was Hard drive device names... serial numbers

[Gustau Pérez i Querol]

Al 01/03/2013 23:52, En/na Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. ha escrit:
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> I only have 15 drives...(12 HDDs and 3 SSDs) but the ordering of drives seemed to randomize on every boot (wonder now if the controller was doing some kind of staggering in spin ups.  And, their other drivers cope with it.  They provide a v1.1 driver for FreeBSD 7.2 or source to the v1.0 driver.)  And, then everything moved around when I changed controllers a few times.
>
> I had resorted at one point to putting device.hints to force all the drives to keep their mapping.  Which caused problems elsewhere, and a mess when I added another controller.  But, then I changed to more meaningful GPT labels and exported and re-imported my zpools with '-d /dev/gpt', and now things are ok.

    That reordering issue is what made me switch to geom labels first 
(IIRC I did by 5.x era) and next switched to GPT labels. The GPT allows 
me first to easily used those drives with ZFS and specially because 
those labels belong to the partition scheme and thus are filesystem 
independent.

    What I found specially useful is to be able to identify those 
drives. When I drive fails I know where it is because of the simple name 
convention I use; but having a blinking led helps a lot, specially when 
writing the recovery plan for the rest of the team.

    Gus

> L
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-- 
    Salut i força,

    Gustau

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O O O Unitat de Gestió dels departaments
O O O Matemàtica Aplicada IV i Enginyeria Telemàtica

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