Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 08:04:42 -0700 (MST) From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> To: Borja Marcos <borjam@sarenet.es> Cc: FreeBSD Filesystems <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>, Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> Subject: Re: RFC: Suggesting ZFS "best practices" in FreeBSD Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1301220759420.61512@wonkity.com> In-Reply-To: <314B600D-E8E6-4300-B60F-33D5FA5A39CF@sarenet.es> References: <314B600D-E8E6-4300-B60F-33D5FA5A39CF@sarenet.es>
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On Tue, 22 Jan 2013, Borja Marcos wrote: > 1- Dynamic disk naming -> We should use static naming (GPT labels, for instance) > > ZFS was born in a system with static device naming (Solaris). When you plug a disk it gets a fixed name. As far as I know, at least from my experience with Sun boxes, c1t3d12 is always c1t3d12. FreeBSD's dynamic naming can be very problematic. > > For example, imagine that I have 16 disks, da0 to da15. One of them, say, da5, dies. When I reboot the machine, all the devices from da6 to da15 will be renamed to the device number -1. Potential for trouble as a minimum. > > After several different installations, I am preferring to rely on static naming. Doing it with some care can really help to make pools portable from one system to another. I create a GPT partition in each drive, and Iabel it with a readable name. Thus, imagine I label each big partition (which takes the whole available space) as pool-vdev-disk, for example, pool-raidz1-disk1. I'm a proponent of using various types of labels, but my impression after a recent experience was that ZFS metadata was enough to identify the drives even if they were moved around. That is, ZFS bare metadata on a drive with no other partitioning or labels. Is that incorrect?
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