zfs discuss - Jul 2011 - about leaving zpools exported for future use

I''ve posted this some time ago but lost track of the subject line and
answers.

My zfs machine has croaked to the point that it just quits after some
10 15 minutes of uptime.  No interesting logs or messages what so
ever.  At least not that I''ve found.  It just quietly quits.

I''m not interested in dinking around with this setup... its well
ready for upgrade. 

What I''d like to do is during one or two of those 15 minutes of
uptime, set things up so that when I do get the replace setup, I can
just attache those disks and import the pools.

It may be complicated by rpool which also has some keeper data stored
on it.

But I wondered if by exporting rpool then it could be imported as
something else and I''d just delete the OS stuff.

What I''d like to see is an outline of what steps I''d need to
take to
so that the above scene could be done.

Any amount of detail is welcome.

On Sun, Jul 03, 2011 at 05:44:34PM -0500, Harry Putnam
wrote:
> My zfs machine has croaked to the point that it just quits after some
> 10 15 minutes of uptime.  No interesting logs or messages what so
> ever.  At least not that I''ve found.  It just quietly quits.
> 
> I''m not interested in dinking around with this setup... its well
> ready for upgrade. 
> 
> What I''d like to do is during one or two of those 15 minutes of
> uptime, set things up so that when I do get the replace setup, I can
> just attache those disks and import the pools.
> 
> It may be complicated by rpool which also has some keeper data stored
> on it.
By all means export a data pool if you can/like.

You won''t be able to export rpool while booted off it, but that
won''t
matter.  Attach it to your new machines, and import -f with a new name
(so as not to conflict with the new rpool).  It may be easier to do
this attach after boot, to avoid potential confusion by the bootloader
as to which rpool to use. 

If hotplugging is inconvenient, you could boot the old machine from CD,
and import -f the rpool with a new name, then export it, before moving
the disks. This will then be the autodetected name on the new machine.

--
Dan.
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Adding to Daniel''s good answer, you may also want to use an
"alternate root" and/or rename the old rpool (especially
if the new system''s one is also called "rpool") as in:

# zpool import -f -R /oldrpool rpool oldrpool

This would keep old rpool''s tree (including absolute mount
points from FS properties) mounted under a dedicated /oldrpool
mountpoint.

Apparently if you already have an "rpool" of the new system,
you would have to use the numeric GUID for the import.

Run "zpool import" to print the pools which your system sees
as available but not imported, beside the name there is a
long string of numbers. Use it in place of "rpool" in the
import commands.

HTH,
//Jim