zfs drive keeps failing between export and import

[David Ehrmann]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:07 PM, Wes Morgan <morganw at chemikals.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, David Ehrmann wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 3:21 PM, David Ehrmann <ehrmann at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> In the /dev/ad8.eli that zfs doesn't recognize, I found a 16 byte
>> string that was repeated a lot, but it was also repeated in another
>> place: the good /dev/ad10.eli (though the offsets were different).
>> The other weird thing: the good and bad /dev/ad8.eli look a lot alike:
>> one 16 byte string, then another that gets repeated, then another 16
>> byte string randomly shows up at 0x200.
>
> The "xxx.eli" devices are the decrypted versions, aren't they? ZFS vdev
> labels and uberblocks occupy the first 512k of the device, and consist of
> virtually identical data, differing only by the GUID that the label claims
> to be and a sha256 checksum... So, decrypted, they should all be very, very
> similar. You could actually use the label from any device in a pool to
> reconstruct the label for any other device.

Let me clarify one thing: when zfs has problems reading the device,
the data resemble the data when it's read fine, but by resemble, I
don't mean values as much as structure.  The values are all wrong, but
if you overlaid hexdumps, both share repeated patterns.  That makes me
think it's an encryption problem, but I haven't been able to reproduce
it with other configurations.