Unexpected gmirror behavior: Is this a bug?

[Ivan Voras]

Peter Steele wrote:
> We had a somewhat startling scenario occur with gmirror. We have systems with four drives ad4, ad6, ad8, and ad10, with the OS setup on a mirrored slice across all four drives. The ad4 drive failed at one point, due to a simple bad connection in its drive bay. While it was offline, the system was continued to be used for a while and new data was added to the mirrored file system. 
> 
> We eventually took the box down to deal with ad4, and tried simply pulling and reinserting the drive. On reboot we saw that the BIOS detected the drive, so that was good. However, when FreeBSD got to the point of starting up the GEOM driver, instead of reinserting ad4 into the more current mirror consisting of ad6/ad8/ad10 and resyncing it with that data, the GEOM driver assumed ad4 was the "good" mirror and ended up resyncing ad6/ad8/ad10 with the data from ad4, causing the new files we had added to those drives to be lost. 
> 
> This only happens with ad4. If ad6 for example goes offline in the same way, when it is reinserted it does not become the dominant drive and resync its data with the other drives. Rather its data is overwritten with the data from the 3 member mirror, as you'd expect. 
> 
> So, clearly ad4, the first disk, is treated specially. The question is this a bug or a feature? Is there anyway to prevent this behavior? This would be a disastrous thing to happen in the field on one of our customer systems. 

This definitely looks like a bug. Try asking again on the freebsd-geom@
list. Provide output of "gmirror list".

From what you said it looks like you did the procedure safely - you
turned off the server, then pulled the drive and reinserted it, then
turned it on again, right?


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