zfs discuss - Apr 2007 - am I completely insane, or will this work?

After having set my desktop to install (to a pair of 140G SATA disks
that zfs is mirroring) at work, I was trying to skip the dump slice
since in this case, no, I don''t really want it.  ;)

pfinstall refuses to install without a dump slice, so I went ahead
and set the last 500MB of the disks to be s1 and pointed dump at
the one disk.

I really don''t want it this way, I want to let ZFS have the entire
disks.

Can I go into format, delete s1 and redo s0 to extend to the end of the
disk and just expect ZFS to do the right thing and be able to use the
whole disk, or would I bet better off detaching the on disk from the
mirror, blowing away the partition table and re-attaching it as a whole
disk and then repeating the process with the other disk?

-brian
-- 
"Perl can be fast and elegant as much as J2EE can be fast and elegant.
In the hands of a skilled artisan, it can and does happen; it''s just
that most of the shit out there is built by people who''d be better
suited to making sure that my burger is cooked thoroughly."  -- Jonathan
Patschke

Brian Hechinger wrote:
> After having set my desktop to install (to a pair of 140G SATA disks
> that zfs is mirroring) at work, I was trying to skip the dump slice
> since in this case, no, I don''t really want it.  ;)
Don''t underestimate the usefulness of a dump device. You might run into
a panic some day, for all you know. A dump device would be very useful then.

See also the replies in this thread.
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=113477&#113477
> pfinstall refuses to install without a dump slice, so I went ahead
> and set the last 500MB of the disks to be s1 and pointed dump at
> the one disk.
> 
> I really don''t want it this way, I want to let ZFS have the entire
disks.
> 
> Can I go into format, delete s1 and redo s0 to extend to the end of the
> disk and just expect ZFS to do the right thing and be able to use the
> whole disk, or would I bet better off detaching the on disk from the
> mirror, blowing away the partition table and re-attaching it as a whole
> disk and then repeating the process with the other disk?
Assuming that ZFS is using s0 right now, the former would not work. You 
could probably just detach one disk and reattach the whole disk (cxtxdx 
without specifying a slice), re-silver and do the same with the other. I 
have not tried it but it seems it should work.

-Manoj

Manoj Joseph wrote:
> Brian Hechinger wrote:
>> After having set my desktop to install (to a pair of 140G SATA disks
>> that zfs is mirroring) at work, I was trying to skip the dump slice
>> since in this case, no, I don''t really want it.  ;)
>
> Don''t underestimate the usefulness of a dump device. You might run
> into a panic some day, for all you know. A dump device would be very 
> useful then.
If he''s doing truly confidential work on the machine, he may really not
want to have any crashdumps laying around.

-Luke
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