Cat Proof External Storage

What happens when you disconnect the drive on the fly?
(e.g. set up a tripping hazard for your cat)

You get this message

What happens when you do the same thing to a ZFS pool? This is no different
than what you get on Solaris, except it is on my Mac Book Pro.

  pool: p1
   state: DEGRADED
  status: One or more devices could not be opened.  Sufficient replicas exist for
      the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state.
  action: Attach the missing device and online it using 'zpool online'.
     see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-D3
   scrub: scrub completed with 0 errors on Sat Dec  8 01:44:00 2007
  config:
 
      NAME         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
      p1           DEGRADED     0     0     0
        mirror     DEGRADED     0     0     0
          disk7s1  UNAVAIL      0   114     0  cannot open
          disk0s3  ONLINE       0     0     0

Fortunately for me, my system keeps merrily chugging along.

Unfortunately (sort of) and this is much more of an issue on my Mac than on
any other system I am adding and removing devices much more frequently.

When I last connected the external disk and imported the pool I had 6
more "disks" visible to the system (really a usb thumb drive) another FW
device and a few SW RAID devices. This caused my nice portable external
FW disk to appear as disk7.

  diskutil list             
  /dev/disk0
     #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
     0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *149.1 Gi   disk0
     1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
     2:                  Apple_HFS noroute                 88.9 Gi    disk0s2
     3:                  Apple_HFS                         57.0 Gi    disk0s3
     4:                  Apple_HFS noroute_2_1_2           2.6 Gi     disk0s4
  /dev/disk1
     #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
     0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *55.9 Gi    disk1
     1:                  Apple_HFS                         55.9 Gi    disk1s1 

 

The difference between the zpool status and diskutil list output
is the device configured for the pool is disk7s1 not the currently visible
disk1s1.

I don't know how to recover from this situation live. If the device has not
renumbered you just zpool online p1 disk7s1 to reconnect on a different
device number I export and import the pool again.

To state that another way, I don't know how to effectively do:
zpool online p1
similar to
zpool replace p1
(the replace, even with -f, failed telling me that was busy)

I have just requested a pre-release tarball that is reported to fix some bugs
in the current beta. We will see how it goes.

Other Observations:

Once you load the RW kext, it appears that anyone can do anything to the ZFS pools
and filesystems. On my single user system this is OK. I am the only user and guest
accounts are disabled. e.g. Initiate a scrub as a non-admin guest account or create a
snpashot as nobody (sudo -u nobody zfs snapshot p1/Music@nobody)

You CANNOT download music from the iTunes store in the current beta. you get a
permission error. I can however add music from local files.

 

Edit: Cleaned up the block quotes a bit, still not really rendering as one might hope.