Re: ZFS attaching direct access drives as Scsibus#target#drive#

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Daniel Jameson <DJameson_at_emerytelcom.com>wrote:

>
> I'm in the process of building several zfs pools for a backup-server,
> the machine has 2 24 port sata 3 controllers and 48 1TB drives for
> storage.  I've done a little testing and found that building  a pool by
> using the da# device names can be inconsistent.  For example if a device
> is lost from the first controller and the box is re-booted all the da#s
> shuffle up,  which creates problems with adjacent pools, and the
> potential for catastrophic failure. In the Sun documentation zpool
> allows a pool to be built by using S#T#D# (Scsibus Target Drive) syntax,
> when I attempt it in FBSD It returns:" cannot use '/dev/c0t0d0': must be
> a GEOM provider" does anyone know a way to statically map a
> scsibus/target/drive to a specific da# or a fix to allow specific drives
> by target numbers to be added to a zpool?


Forgive me for asking (because it would surprise me if it didn't), but
doesn't ZFS' GEOM attach taste figure out what drives go where all by
itself?  Isn't there sufficient information on a disk to allow ZFS to place
it into the correct pool?

certainly glabel'ing the drives should work just fine if zfs doesn't, but
it's a hack of a solution.

glabel can have some funny effects due to the geom taste order.  If
something is part of a mirror (for instance) and the label tastes before the
mirror, I've seen items of the mirror come up with glabel instead of
attaching to the mirror.