Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013 21:00:41 +0100 From: Paul Schenkeveld <freebsd@psconsult.nl> To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Using glabel Message-ID: <20130112200041.GA77338@psconsult.nl> In-Reply-To: <CAG27QgTQFA2CvBSrH0Zid9oQg5RbmU55OvfP0njMoLpqHb_GTg@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAG27QgTQFA2CvBSrH0Zid9oQg5RbmU55OvfP0njMoLpqHb_GTg@mail.gmail.com>
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On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 09:13:33PM -0800, Tim Gustafson wrote: > Hi, > > We have a few servers with 45 disks each. It gets a bit cumbersome at > the moment to map a failed drive (reported via "zpool status") to a > physical device. The physical devices are labeled with serial > numbers, and ZFS reports device nodes. I was wondering if I could use > "glabel" to label each of the disks we have with their serial number > to make identification easier, and then reconfigure the zpool to > import the drives by gptid, rather than device node. > > So, my thinking was along the lines of: > > - obtain the device serial numbers, probably using smartctl > - zpool export tank > - glabel -v SERIAL-NUMBER-0 /dev/ada0 > - glabel -v SERIAL-NUMBER-1 /dev/ada1 > - glabel -v SERIAL-NUMBER-2 /dev/ada2 > - snip 43 more glabel lines > - zpool import tank -d /dev/gptid > > Is there any reason that this is a bad idea? Do I have the command > sequence correct? Using labels instead of auto-enumerated names (ada0, ada1 ...) is generally a good idea I think and makes sysadmin life a bit easier. You can use glabel to label your disks or partition the disks with gpart (using the GPT scheme) and let gpt put a label on each (-l flag). In the past I always used glabel for that but since I had disks fail on me and found out that a replacement disk of the same capacity was actually several sectors smaller than the original, I changed to using gpart and allocate all but the few last MB of every disk so that if I have to replace a broken disk by one which is a bit smaller it won't give a problem. Labels created using the -l option of gpart appear in /dev/gpt instead of /dev/label but that should be no problem. ZFS finds the labelled partitions first, even without using the -d flag. HTH Paul Schenkeveld
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