zfs file names (inodes) without files (ENOENT)

[David Brodbeck]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 11:12 PM, Martin von Gagern
<Martin.vGagern at gmx.net> wrote:
> Thought the same, and gave it a try. zpool claims there is no pool of
> that name. "zpool -f" doesn't help. Looking at the device nodes, it
> appears as though OI would only recognize 3 of my 4 HDDs, which seems
> really strange, given the fact that they're all wired the same way.

That is pretty odd.  OI's biggest weakness is hardware support, IMHO.
The kernel is written by Sun (well, Oracle, now) and they have no
interest in supporting hardware they don't sell.  Drivers for
commodity hardware are often buggy or nonexistent.  It reminds me of
the early, early days of Linux and BSD, where you'd have to buy and
return three SCSI cards before you got one that worked.

> OI boot process provides too little information for my taste

Yeah, it's *quite* terse.  The OI text console in general is lacking
in refinement; Sun hardware grew frame buffers pretty early, so the
assumption was you'd either be running some windowing environment (if
you were physically at the system) or you'd be using a serial console
(if it's a headless server.)  Trying to administer an OI box via the
system console tends to be an exercise in frustration.

> So I'm heading towards Linux now, as no solution to the FreeBSD ZFS
> problems seems to be forthcoming. Will probably be running some tandem
> of btrfs and Ext4 for now, until btrfs becomes more mature or space
> requirements force me to drop one of those file systems.

I share your frustrations.  I would really like to see btrfs mature.
I really want a filesystem with pooled free space and transparent
compression, but I've found OI frustrating from a hardware standpoint.
 I didn't have the problems you did with the FreeBSD ZFS
implementation (maybe because I didn't dig into it very far), but I do
need NFSv4, and the performance of FreeBSD's NFSv4 server is just too
slow for me to consider it a reasonable replacement.  So I'm kind of
left with no way to get everything I want in one OS.