ZFS: invalid label -- what is expected? (solved)

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Alexander Leidinger <Alexander at Leidinger.net> writes:
> After digging around in the ZFS sources and investigating some on-disk
> structures (with some confusing results, as the data didn't seem
> corrupt to me), I exported the pool. After that all disk where again
> in the online state. All are connected via firewire and came back in a
> different order (daX) after a reboot (panic). It seems our
> implementation wasn't able to handle this without the reimport help.

IIRC, it works fine for ATA devices but not for CAM devices (which
include SCSI, SAS, USB, Firewire).  I'm not sure whether pjd@ is working
on that, but when creating a new pool, you can save yourself some
trouble down the road by labeling the disks.

You can also fix an existing pool by replacing each disk one by one with
larger labeled disks - they must be larger, since the label will consume
some space and ZFS will refuse to replace a disk in a raidz pool with
one that is smaller than the smallest pre-existing disk.  As a bonus,
you will end up with a larger pool than you started out with :)

I've been toying with the idea of writing a gnop-like geom that allows a
disk to be referenced by its serial number if the underlying driver is
able to supply it.  That would bypass glabel's disk-shrinking issue when
working on whole disks.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no