wiki adjustment regarding FreeBSD ZFS spares

Johan Hendriks joh.hendriks at gmail.com
Thu Jan 12 10:06:34 UTC 2012


On the FreeBSD wiki page about ZFS, there is no notification that a 
spare on FreeBSD is not hot, and that human intervention is needed.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS
On the page there is a link called Known problems / gotchas for ZFS 
<http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems>
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems
I think the cold spare is a real ZFS gotcha on FreeBSD.
It would be in my opinion a good idea to add a warning about the spares 
on that page.
On the forum and on this list, there are several persons that assumed 
that a spare added to the pool is hot.
If you read the zfs admin guide from solaris, it is hot.
Also the man page of zpool tells you it is hot.!
And zpool accepts a spare without any warning, so people get a false 
sense of security using a spare.

just my thoughts.

regards
Johan Hendriks




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