On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 07:55:14PM +0000, Ross Smith wrote: > On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 7:11 PM, Nicolas Williams > <nicolas.willi...@sun.com> wrote: > > I was thinking more something like: > > > > - find all disk devices and slices that have ZFS pools on them > > - show users the devices and pool names (and UUIDs and device paths in > > case of conflicts).. > > I was thinking that device & pool names are too variable, you need to > be reading serial numbers or ID's from the device and link to that.
Device names are, but there's no harm in showing them if there's something else that's less variable. Pool names are not very variable at all. > > - in the case that the user wants to initialize a drive to be a backup > > you need something more complex. > > > > - one possibility is to tell the user when to attach the desired > > backup device, in which case the GUI can detect the addition and > > then it knows that that's the device to use (but be careful to > > check that the user also owns the device so that you don't pick > > the wrong one on multi-seat systems) > > I was actually thinking of a resident service. Tim's autobackup > script was capable of firing off backups when it detected the > insertion of a USB drive, and if you've got something sitting there > monitoring drive insertions you could have it prompt the user when new > drives are detected, asking if they should be used for backups. That will do. Of course, there may be other uses for removable drives than just backups, so this will probably have to be a plug-in framework. > Of course, you'll need some settings for this so it's not annoying if > people don't want to use it. A simple tick box on that pop up dialog > allowing people to say "don't ask me again" would probably do. I would like something better than that. "Don't ask me again" sucks when much, much later you want to be asked and you don't know how to get the system to ask you. > You'd then need a second way to assign drives if the user changed > their mind. I'm thinking this would be to load the software and > select a drive. Mapping to physical slots would be tricky, I think > you'd be better with a simple view that simply names the type of > interface, the drive size, and shows any current disk labels. It > would be relatively easy then to recognise the 80GB USB drive you've > just connected. Right, so do as I suggested: tell the user to remove the device if it's plugged in, then plug it in again. That way you can known unambiguously (unless the user is doing this with more than one device at a time). > Also, because you're formatting these drives as ZFS, you're not > restricted to just storing your backups on them. You can create a > root pool (to contain the XML files, etc), and the backups can then be > saved to a filesystem within that. Absolutely! > That means the drive then functions as both a removable drive, and as > a full backup for your system. Yup. Yet another reason for using zfs send|recv for backups instead of mirrors. Nico -- _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
