ZFS file corruption problem

[Mark Murawski]

On 03/14/2012 05:50 AM, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> Quoting Mark Murawski <markm-lists at intellasoft.net> (from Wed, 14 Mar
> 2012 01:08:03 -0400):
>
>> On 03/14/12 01:02, Mark Murawski wrote:
>
>>> Why would the whole pool now become available upon access to a bad file?
>
> Because you configured it like this (respectively didn't configure a
> different behavior).
>
>> Also... isn't this pretty terrible behavior that the process accessing
>> the bad file is unkillable?
>
> If you are in an environment where the disks are not local (ZFS is
> designed with corporate environments in mind), you do not want to fail
> on an application level or panic because of a small hickup in the network.
>
> man zpool:
> ---snip---
> failmode=wait | continue | panic
> Controls the system behavior in the event of catastrophic pool fail?
> ure. This condition is typically a result of a loss of connectivity
> to the underlying storage device(s) or a failure of all devices
> within the pool. The behavior of such an event is determined as fol?
> lows:
>
> wait Blocks all I/O access until the device connectivity is recov?
> ered and the errors are cleared. This is the default behav?
> ior.
>
> continue
> Returns EIO to any new write I/O requests but allows reads to
> any of the remaining healthy devices. Any write requests that
> have yet to be committed to disk would be blocked.
>
> panic Prints out a message to the console and generates a system
> crash dump.
> ---snip---
>
> It is up to you to switch to 'continue' or 'panic' for local disks.
>
> Bye,
> Alexander.
>

Oh... wow.   It's not that I've configured if that way in particular, 
it's more of a matter of the default settings came like that.

But anyway, thanks a ton.  I had no idea that was configurable.  I was 
even thinking that "you know, it would be nice if that behavior was 
configurable".

Once I started running into these problems I started losing faith in zfs 
and its design.  I've been dealing with this corrupt files problem for 
about a week now.

Finding out the fix was as simple as deleting the file and setting a new 
config option has reaffirmed my belief in zfs.