Super Basic N00b

All your general support questions for OpenZFS on OS X.

Super Basic N00b

Postby GroovinBuddha » Tue Jan 21, 2020 7:18 pm

Hello everybody,

If you are just interested in the short version, please scroll down to the ***

I’m new here and generally new to this entire style of computing. I have been a Mac user for more than 30 years now, but until recently have never had any need or inclination to touch things like the command line. I have been focused on things like music creation and teaching.

I’ve decided to start upping my skills and look into doing some computer retraining. I love learning and would be extremely appreciative of any assistance the users of this forum could provide, however it can be generally assumed I don’t know any lingo or acronyms. I have done 0 computer schooling.

At the shop where I work, a customer abandoned a 5,1 MacPro with a dead graphics card and I decided to rebuild it using some pieces I had and some more I ordered. It’s not top-of-the line, but it should be more than adequate for my needs.

I could go into complete build details if needed, but I suspect that would be irrelevant at best and boring at worst.

I had 4x4TB drives that I wanted to pop in the 4 drive bays for bulk storage (boot ssd and dedicated time machine backup are on a pcie card) configured in a RAID. I got a good deal on a 12TB drive (in an unused optical bay) for the RAID to back up to. RAID5 seemed to be the way to go for space vs redundancy and I have the backup drive for extra safety (via Carbon Copy Cloner) in case the whole thing went down. But as I’m sure you know, MacOS doesn’t support RAID5.

I obviously needed a different solution and down the rabbit hole I went until I discovered ZFS. It took work, way more work than I’m used to and I had to hack together bits of knowledge in a way that I’m not yet comfortable with, however, I did it.

I was able to download & install OpenZFS and create a RAIDZ pool with my drives. I was extremely proud of myself, because even though I knew what I was doing was very basic, it took a lot of effort to figure it out. So here’s the first issue I’m facing:

***

Although I was successful...

1. I have no idea what I did
2. I couldn’t replicate it

Is there a way to get some sort of readout of exactly what I did? I hope it will be a good starting point for future discussions.

Thanks in advance
Ed
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Re: Super Basic N00b

Postby lundman » Tue Jan 21, 2020 9:26 pm

Welcome to ZFS on OsX then. I have a macpro 5,1 at home, with a GT1080 in it, dual boot Windows, everything SSD, with USB3 PCI card for the Oculus Rift. Well, I had, one of the kids took it as theirs.

As for ZFS, it currently is mostly commandline, as that is how Unix usually operates. However, I know the dev of ZetaWatch has been adding more and more features to his GUI, so you should probably check that out, as a way to keep an eye on your pool. He might have added pool creation by now, who knows...

But, as for your questions, you can actually see everything done to your pool;

Code: Select all
sudo zpool history


Will dump the history of the pool, which should start with your "zpool create" command. "zpool status" is another you will want to run a lot. If you paste your status here, we can confirm if everything looks correct.

There are some beginner's guides out there, you don't have to look for one specifically for OsX. But the wiki will at least tell you the recommended "zpool create" command, in particular, that OsX prefers "formD".
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Re: Super Basic N00b

Postby GroovinBuddha » Sat Jan 25, 2020 7:32 pm

lundman,

Thank you very much for the reply. I kept checking the board and didn't see any posted replies, then I remembered to refresh the page. Not the most idiotic thing I've done all week, but I still feel pretty stupid about it. So I ran both commands and her's what got spit out:

History for 'Data':
2020-01-04.20:53:40 zpool create -f -o ashift=13 -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O normalization=formD Data raidz1 disk2 disk5 disk1 disk3
2020-01-05.18:43:09 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-07.06:15:53 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-07.14:44:06 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-09.18:45:46 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-13.21:37:19 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-15.22:00:17 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-16.08:17:38 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-16.18:44:26 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-18.18:58:53 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-18.19:45:38 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-18.20:08:26 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-20.19:19:59 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-21.10:57:32 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-23.01:36:21 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-23.10:18:32 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-23.14:26:28 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-23.16:33:52 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id
2020-01-25.19:15:27 zpool import -a -d /var/run/disk/by-id

(base) Ed-Bowles-MacPro:~ edbowles$ zpool status
pool: Data
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will
continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
scan: resilver in progress since Sat Jan 25 19:15:28 2020
4.53T scanned at 3.94G/s, 3.59T issued at 2.29G/s, 6.59T total
0 resilvered, 54.43% done, 0 days 00:22:23 to go
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
Data ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-807DC780-39C7-4542-B43F-3A7A08B72125 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-22F545F3-455F-4242-BD8C-92E40EDC9597 ONLINE 0 0 1
media-FC273FFA-DACC-6F4C-95A1-C4522CAD8555 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-01122CD5-FBF7-094F-941B-CBF6448C9AC0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

I'd appreciate any insight you can provide.

Cheers
Ed
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Re: Super Basic N00b

Postby GroovinBuddha » Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:41 pm

*** Update ***

I decided to run 'zpool status' one more time before bed and this came up:

pool: Data
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scan: resilvered 274G in 0 days 03:03:50 with 0 errors on Sat Jan 25 22:19:18 2020
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
Data ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-807DC780-39C7-4542-B43F-3A7A08B72125 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-22F545F3-455F-4242-BD8C-92E40EDC9597 ONLINE 0 0 1
media-FC273FFA-DACC-6F4C-95A1-C4522CAD8555 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-01122CD5-FBF7-094F-941B-CBF6448C9AC0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

It would appear the resilvering mentioned in the first status update was not successful.

This begs the question: What is resilvering?

My S.M.A.R.T. status on all the drives shows verified (FWIW)
I know they are old hand-me-down drives so it is very possible one (or more) is failing.

Thanks again
Ed
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Re: Super Basic N00b

Postby Sharko » Sat Feb 01, 2020 3:11 pm

The SMART status being 'verified' is almost meaningless - for whatever reason, Apple software doesn't really attempt to make a judgement call on whether a drive is on the cusp of failing, or even in the early stages of failure. There are third-party tools that either do a better job of judging the health of your disks (DriveDX is one such), or let you examine the actual SMART output to make your own call on drive health (the command line tool smartctl can be downloaded from https://www.smartmontools.org/ for this purpose).

Resilvering is a process that ZFS does when it puts information on disk to create redundancy: it is reading from information from disks that have valid information, and storing a copy of it on another disk. Usually resilvering occurs when you replace a failing disk in a RAIDZ or mirrow with a new disk, so in your case it is a little concerning that it decided to resilver one of your disks. It's been my understanding that resilvering is something that happens to an entire disk, but in your case maybe it only resilvered some limited amount of bad data on one of your disks that is failing or near failing.
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Re: Super Basic N00b

Postby lundman » Tue Feb 04, 2020 10:52 pm

Run zpool clear on the device, then zpool scrub - if it comes back all ok you are fine. Could just be an iffy IO.
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Re: Super Basic N00b

Postby GroovinBuddha » Tue Feb 11, 2020 9:00 pm

Sharko and lundman,

Thanks for the info.

I have been less than impressed with S.M.A.R.T. and was looking into DriveDX already, just haven't bit the bullet on it yet.

A couple of days ago the zpool status seemed to clear up on it's own. I ran the commands you gave me anyways (with the pool name at the end once I read the error message and guessed). The process appears to be ongoing with no estimated completion time, but with no errors being reported anymore I'm less concerned. Though perhaps it means that the reason there's no fins sticking out of the water is that the shark is directly underneath me :lol:

Would either of you fine folk be able to tell me how to get a list of those commands (and others) ?

Is there a way to get the terminal to spit it out?

Thanks for everything
Cheers
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Re: Super Basic N00b

Postby lundman » Thu Feb 13, 2020 12:16 am

Just running "zpool" will spit out all the zpool commands, just as running "zfs" will do the same there.

You will be using "zpool status" a fair bit, especially with "zpool scrub" to see progress.
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