zfs discuss - Feb 2010 - Disk controllers changing the names of disks

I am curious how admins are dealing with controllers like the Dell Perc 5 and 6
that can change the device name on a disk if a disk fails and the machine
reboots.   These controllers are not nicely behaved in that they happily fill in
the device numbers for the physical drive that is missing.  In that case, how
can you recover the zpool that was on the disk?   I understand if the pool was
exported, you can then re-import it.   However, what happens if the machine
completely dies and you have no chance to export the pool?

--
Terry
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

> I am curious how admins are dealing with controllers like the Dell Perc 5
and 6 that can > change the device name on a disk if a disk fails and the
machine reboots.   These
> controllers are not nicely behaved in that they happily fill in the device
numbers for
> the physical drive that is missing.  In that case, how can you recover the
zpool that was > on the disk?   I understand if the pool was exported, you
can then re-import it.
> However, what happens if the machine completely dies and you have no chance
to export the > pool?
>
> --
> Terry
> -- 
You still can import it, Although you might loose some inflight data that was
going in during crash and it can take a while during import to finish
transactions, anyway, it will be fine.

Yours
Markus Kovero

On FreeBSD, I avoid this issue completely by labelling either the entire disk
(via glabel(8)) or individual slices/partitions (via either glabel(8) or gpt
labels).  Use the label name to build the vdevs.  Then it doesn''t
matter where the drive is connected, or how the device node is named/numbered,
everything Just Works(tm).  :)

Hopefully, there are similar tools for labelling disks/partitions on Solaris
systems.
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