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Date:      Sat, 8 May 2010 12:45:54 -0500
From:      Peter Steele <psteele@maxiscale.com>
To:        "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Can a foreign drive's mirrors be prevented from joining identically named mirrors?
Message-ID:  <7B9397B189EB6E46A5EE7B4C8A4BB7CB3E33A500@MBX03.exg5.exghost.com>

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Say I have two systems with two hot-swappable drives and have created mirro=
rs for root, var, and swap across those two drives on each system. If I tak=
e a drive from one system and insert it into the other system, it appears t=
hat the mirror providers on that drive automatically insert themselves into=
 the identically named mirrors on the system where the drive has been inser=
ted. What's worse, they may also become recognized as the mirrors with the =
most recent data, even though they came from a different system and should =
in fact be immediately flagged as dirty and synchronized with the mirrors o=
n the receiving system.

The only solution we've found is that drives being inserted into an existin=
g system should be thoroughly wiped first. The problem with that is we cann=
ot be certain a user will follow that guideline. The alternative is to make=
 sure that the mirrors are uniquely named across all systems. So for exampl=
e instead of having mirrors named root, var, and swap, we could name them r=
oot-<macId>, var-<macId>, and swap-<macId>, where <macId> is a unique ID ba=
sed on the MAC address of a given system's Ethernet interface. This is a 10=
0% solution but it would likely solve most of the problems we've encountere=
d.

My question is whether there is any other way to accomplish this? We do not=
 want the mirrors on a drive being inserted into another system to automati=
cally added to the receiving systems identically named mirrors.




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