Re: [HEADSUP] zfs root pool mounting

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 3:20 AM, Andriy Gapon <avg_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

...

> One thing that I recommend to all ZFS users is to make use of boot environments.
> They are very easy, very convenient and may save a lot of trouble.
> Use either any of the tool available in ports (e.g. sysutils/beadm) or just "do
> boot environments" in an ad hoc fashion: snapshot and clone your current / known
> good boot+root filesystem and you have a safe environment to fall back to.

Looks interesting (this page has a slightly more in-depth description
of what beadm tries to achieve for the layman like me that doesn't use
*Solaris: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/*bsd-17/howto-zfs-madness-beadm-on-freebsd-4175412036/
).

> Proper zdb -l usage was described in the "HEADSUP" posting.
> It's also available in zdb(8).  zdb -l should be used with disks/partitions/etc,
> not with pool names.

I realized that mistake after the fact :/.

>>     I'm running into the same behavior before and after I upgraded sac/sac2.
>>     My git branch is a lightly modified version of FreeBSD, but
>> doesn't contain any ZFS specific changes (I can point you to it if you
>> like to look at it).
>>     Would appreciate some pointers on what to do next.
>
> Try to get a working environment (using livecd, another disk, backups, etc), try
> to follow the original instructions.

Ok. That's sort of what I'm trying. Given that I didn't do a *ton* of
customizations, I might just tar up the root pool's contents and basic
configuration, wipe it out, and try creating a new one from scratch
and restore the contents after the fact. However, thinking back I
could turn on terse debugging in ZFS after building it with that (I've
done it once before -- forgot about it until now). That would probably
be the best way to get the official "story" from ZFS as to what it
thinks is going south when importing the pool.

Thanks!
-Garrett