Thanks, Richard, for another clarification! I personally always considered your post as enlightening and helpful. Thank you! It was not my intention to step on anyone's feet with my remarks. I simply wished that there was a source of all that information that needed to be extracted from various sources for my - as far as I am concerned - very basic question. Had I known better, I hadn't asked. Now it took me 24 hours to just get a new file system up. If a bug has been prevailing for 2.5 years, one better entered it into the Guide, eventually.
Again, a good documentation starts from scratch and addresses the basic requirements. Personally, I consider it unfortunate that said passage in the ZFS Admin Guide starts with something like 'imagine you wanted to attach and mirror a drive dedicated to Solaris to an existing drive dedicated fully to Solaris' (I am just to lazy to go there and copy from there.) That's nothing like a Guide, sorry. The Guide should start from a partition, be it bf on 'DOS'/x86 or a slice. Whci is the command to prepare that partition (bf) or set of slices (SPARC) for ZFS? (And nothing else belongs here, AFAIAC) Which zpool command is it that takes or prepares the slice 2 such that later on I can set up a set of file systems on it? I guess there should be one, notwithstanding the fact that - later on - the whole raid/mirror can be done in a single go. [That something like this is acutely missing can be seen from this thread; including all the various, and to a good number contradictory messages I got, including offline. Do we need to create slices using format/partition? Can we use s0 (I found out, we can't), can we use s2 (Johan thinks so), can we 0,0 s2 (Dick thinks so). Therefore, again, the basic commands are indispensable.] I do understand that it is a better sales argument to say, "If you wanted to get an exact copy of your partition /dev/sda4 on /dev/sdb5, for example, you'd issue dump -0ua -f - /dev/sda4 | restore -r -f - on a formatted and mounted file system /dev/sdb5." But that's kind of crazy, isn't it? Once you know all the commands, it is great. But in the first place, a good Guide introduces the building blocks, in this case dump and restore, and the relevant options, one by one. Probably with dumping to a file first. Many newcomers want to start playing, exploring , learning. Not everyone wants to run ZFS root&boot as one and only file system immediately. Why not start by fdisk-ing an empty partition on a supplementary drive? Preparing it for ZFS, including the eventual preparation of slices (if needed, format) Creating a pool. Creating file systems within the pool. Creating snapshots, destroying snapshots, and so forth. I for one would love to introduce ZFS in my field, tertiary education. But then I'd want building blocks. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
