ZFS
Yippie, ZFS is finaly available for people to use. Still seems a little buggy, or it could just be the old hardware I was trying it on. Anyways, I setup an old Dell machine at the office with Solaris 11 build 27 (AKA Solaris Express) and then put in a 7gb and a 12gb drive that I found in some other machines laying around. Well since the 2 extra drives were not the same size I could not mirror them so I tried to make a stripped file system:
Well that seemed easy. So I then tried to create some file systems in side of the /mypool file system:
and here is where the fun began. The machine instantly rebooted. What came next I was not expecting. The machine went in to an infinite loop of rebooting it self. It seems that the second harddrive had a couple bad sectors on it. What was interesting was that instead of just not mounting the file system and coming up, it destoryed the /etc/path_to_inst file, and also the boot archive. So I booted in to single user mode to fix the boot archive and then tried rebooting again and it continued to crash. So I booted back in to single user again and tried to figure out how to disable the zfs.. Only thing I could find quickly (with out search other people’s blogs, and the web) by looking in /etc was a directory called zfs, in there there was one file called zpool.cache. I deleted this file and rebooted and it booted right back up.
Next up was trying to find how how to fix it. I ran a format/analyze/compare on the drive and it came back fine. So I tried to recreate the pool and it would not let me, kept complaining about the EFI labels being wrong. format/fdisk would not let me clean the disk. So I ended up doing something I never thought I would have to do, boot in to MS Windows XP. Windows showed the disks as GPT protected disks and the gui disk manager would not let me change anything on them. However the DOS based diskpart command would let me “clean” the disk of the EFI/GPT and so everything was fine now. Booted back in to solaris and I was now able to recreate the pool. This time I left the second disk out.
And then it was quiting time, so I need to find a better machine to play with….
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