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MC wrote:
>> Putting into the zpool command would feel odd to me, but I agree that
>> there may be a useful utility here.
>>
>
> There MAY be a useful utility here? I know this isn't your fight Dave, but
> this tipped me and I have to say something :)
>
> Can we agree that the format command lists the disks it can use because the
> format command is part of the user-facing disk storage software stack and
> listing what objects it can act upon is one of the most fundemental features
> of the user-facing tools of the stack?! It is for this reason alone that ZFS
> needs a similar feature. Because it makes sense.
>
I'd like to suggest a name: lsdisk and lspart to list the disks and also
the disks/partitions that are available. (Or maybe lsdisk should just
list the disks and partitions in an indented list? Listing the
partitions is important. Listing the controllers might not hurt
anything, either.)
Linux has lspci[0], lsscsi, lsusb, lsof, and a number of other
ls-tab-tab utilities out-of-the-box[1]. These utilities would be quite
intuitive for folks who've learned Linux first, and would help people
transition to Solaris quickly.
When I first learned Solaris (some years ago now), it took me a
surprisingly long time to get the device naming scheme and the partition
numbering. The naming/numbering is quite intuitive (except for that
part about c0t0d0s2 being the entire device[1]), but I would have felt
that I understood it quicker if I'd seen a nice listing that matches the
concept, and also had quick way to find out the name of that disk that I
just plugged in. My friends who are new to Solaris seem to have the
same problem out of the gate.
-Luke
[0] Including lspci and lsusb with Solaris would be a great idea --
prtconf and prtdiag are very useful, but lspci is very quick, clear, and
concise. IIRC, lspci is included in Nexenta. I haven't checked for
these utilities on the new OpenSolaris yet, though, so maybe they're
there already.
[1] Since Solaris 10 still uses /bin/sh as the root shell, I feel that I
must explain that this is tab completion. In bash/zsh/tcsh, hitting tab
twice searches the $PATH for ls* and displays the results.... I know
that most-everyone on the list already knows this, but I can't help my
self! [ducks!]
[2] If I'm giving someone a tour of Solaris administration, /dev/sda
isn't particularly different from /dev/dsk/c0t0d0. But if I open
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 with a partitioning tool, repartition, then
build/mount a filesystem without Something Bad happening, then my
spectators heads usually explode. After that, they don't believe me
when I tell them that they mostly understand what's going on. Yes, ZFS
and the EFI disklabels fix this when you have a system with a ZFS root
and no UFS disks -- but UFS is still necessary in a lot of
configuration, so this kind of system-quirk should be made obvious to
Unix-literate people coming from non-Solaris backgrounds.
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