9.3, offline drive, system seems to get confused.

[JayG30]

Just wanted to report, if it hasn't already, that if you offline a device in a pool (through the GUI), it seems things may go strange. To start with there is no "online" feature in the GUI. You only get an option to replace. The replace didn't work for me. I don't see the message right now (it pops up on the top of the screen in green), but I believe it was something like "this disk is already part of a vdev, use -f...." blah blah blah.

Since you can't "online" from the GUI, I tried to do it from the command line. Got the same warning about using -f. Tried using -f, still failed. Trying to do a replace tells me the disk is already in the pool.

To solve the issue I had to "wipe" the drive and than replace it. That kicked off a resilvering. This doesn't seem ideal.

 

[dlavigne]

What were you trying to accomplish by offlining the drive? It is designed to safely offline the drive (and its swap) in preparation for replacing a failed drive.

 

[JayG30]

Sorry but that isn't entirely accurate. There are multiple reasons a device may be offlined other than replacement. It is entirely possible someone might offline a disk, inspect it, put it back, and online it. They make an online command, not just a replace command. Please see
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gazgm/index.html

What I was trying to accomplish is something that can be done without issue in Solaris based distro's like omniOS, which is to offline the device for whatever reason (it really doesn't matter why but perhaps to inspect a drive, temporary issue, so on), put the disk back in, and online it. This works without issue in OmniOS as I tested it the other day.

The first issue is freenas should provide the ability to online the device through the GUI, not just offline and replace. Especially if they allow the user to offline it.

The second issue is that when I put the drive back in and issued the online command from the CLI (since that is the only way) it doesn't seem to work reliably. I think it might get confused due to now freenas labels drives differently than other zfs systems (gptid).

I will test using straight freebsd to see if the issue exists there for me, but my guess is it won't and it is freenas (as I said because I think it has to do with the labeling it does). This all in a test system so no big deal, u just blow the pool apart.

 

[dlavigne]

You could make a feature request though that does seem an edge case. If you do, post the issue number here.

 

[JayG30]

Ok, but I think it is a pretty big oversight to allow a user to offline a drive via the GUI and not give them the ability to online it.
Someone could simply want to offline the drive to check a serial number, put it back in, and online it.
There is no reason to replace/resilver in such a case!


Issue #8677 created.

 

[JayG30]

FYI, feature is complete and scheduled for next software update. Thanks freenas devs. :)

 

[ToBeFrank]

Note that it was only implemented for unencrypted disks.