SYSADMINMAN» Solaris

Replacing a failed zpool ZFS drive

matt — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:56:26 +0000

We have a Sun X4500 ‘Thumper’ that recently had a failed drive. Our zpools are all raidz2 with 4 spares. We were getting errors on the disk c1t5d0, although the drive hadn’t failed completely.

As we had not yet tested replacing a ‘live’ drive the disk was pulled from the system before running any commands to remove it from the pool.

You can run the following command to see the status of your pools -

zpool status

Our pool was showing as degraded and that a spare drive had been brought online -

raidz2 DEGRADED 0 0 0

c0t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

c0t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

spare DEGRADED 0 0 0

c1t5d0 UNAVAIL 0 0 0 cannot open

c1t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

To remove the failed disk from the pool we ran the command -

zpool detach zpoolname c1t5d0

Now our pool showed as being online and all that was left to do was to set up the replaced drive to be a new spare.

First we have to configure it in Solaris. To check that the system is seeing the drive run -

cfgadm

and there was our new, unconfigured drive -

sata1/5 disk connected unconfigured unknown

To configure the disk in Solaris run -

cfgadm -cconfigure sata1/5::dsk/c1t5d0

and then just add it to the pool as a spare -

zpool add zpoolname spare c1t5d0

Remove all ZFS snapshots

matt — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:08:39 +0000

Here’s a small bash script to destroy all existing zfs snapshots.

Run at your own risk!

#!/bin/bash
for snapshot in `zfs list -H -t snapshot | cut -f 1`
do
zfs destroy $snapshot
done

ERROR: Could not open file (/a/etc/vfstab)

matt — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:37:35 +0000

I was trying to install Solaris U5 on one of our Sun boxes using jumpstart today and came across the error –

ERROR: Could not open file (/a/etc/vfstab)

We were previously using Solaris U4 and I had copied the U5 media to our jumpstart server. What I had forgotten to do was to copy the x86.miniroot file from the installation media to where it was being loaded from.

This resulted in the U5 installation trying to use the U4 ramdisk image. Doh!

So, if you see the same error, it’s something to check.