by Sharko » Mon Nov 25, 2019 9:48 am
Just want to clarify... are you saying that you used to boot up your computer with this external pool connected and powered on, and it would auto-import (let's call that scenario A)? Or are you saying that you have been used to connecting the external pool to an already running computer, and it would auto-import when connected (let's call that scenario B)?
For scenario A, in my experience, whether a pool auto-imports on power up is a hit or miss affair that depends on the timing of various things: how quickly the drive achieves a ready state, whether the OS has enumerated the bus it is on, if FileVault is in play, etc. It wouldn't be at all surprising if Catalina had different timing that "broke" auto-import.
For scenario B, I've never known that was even possible (to connect up and auto-import) without setting up an explicit script. I think it is theoretically possible to create such a script and set up launchd to run it, but I don't think it is a standard feature of OpenZFSonOSX.
As for sudo, in my experience all the zfs and zpool interaction requires you to be root, and thus sudo is required. The delegate feature is not implemented (last I checked) in OpenZFSonOSX, so you have to be root to execute the zfs and zpool commands. In some other ZFS implementations you can delegate the capability to run zfs import to a regular user account, but again, as far as I know we don't have that capability.