zfs discuss - Feb 2011 - zfs-discuss Digest, Vol 64, Issue 13

Additionally, the way I do it is to draw a diagram of the drives in the system,
labelled with the drive serial numbers. Then when a drive fails, I can find out
from smartctl which drive it is and remove/replace without trial and error.

On 5 Feb 2011, at 21:54, zfs-discuss-request at opensolaris.org wrote:
> 
> Message: 7
> Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2011 15:42:45 -0500
> From: rwalists at washdcmail.com
> To: David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>
> Cc: zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Identifying drives (SATA)
> Message-ID: <58B53790-323B-4AE4-98CD-575F93B665D5 at washdcmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> 
> On Feb 5, 2011, at 2:43 PM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> 
>> Is there a clever way to figure out which drive is which?  And if I
have to fall back on removing a drive I think is right, and seeing if
that''s true, what admin actions will I have to perform to get the pool
back to safety?  (I''ve got backups, but it''s a pain to restore
of course.) (Hmmm; in single-user mode, use dd to read huge chunks of one disk,
and see which lights come on?  Do I even need to be in single-user mode to do
that?)
> 
> Obviously this depends on your lights working to some extent (the right
light doing something when the right disk is accessed), but I''ve used:
> 
> dd if=/dev/rdsk/c8t3d0s0 of=/dev/null bs=4k count=100000
> 
> which someone mentioned on this list.  Assuming you can actually read from
the disk (it isn''t completely dead), it should allow you to direct
traffic to each drive individually.
> 
> Good luck,
> Ware
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On Sun, February 6, 2011 13:01, Michael Armstrong wrote:
> Additionally, the way I do it is to draw a diagram of the drives in the
> system, labelled with the drive serial numbers. Then when a drive fails, I
> can find out from smartctl which drive it is and remove/replace without
> trial and error.
Having managed to muddle through this weekend without loss (though with a
certain amount of angst and duplication of efforts), I''m in the mood to
label things a bit more clearly on my system :-).

smartctl doesn''t seem to be on my system, though.  I''m running
snv_134.  I''m still pretty badly lost in the whole repository /
package thing with Solaris, most of my brain cells were already
occupied with Red Hat, Debian, and Perl package information :-( .
Where do I look?

Are the controller port IDs, the "C9T3D0" things that ZFS likes,
reasonably stable?  They won''t change just because I add or remove
drives, right; only maybe if I change controller cards?

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info