Wandering Thoughts archives

2022-03-17

I need to remember to check for ZFS filesystems being mounted

Over on the Fediverse I said something:

I keep re-learning the ZFS lesson that you want to check not only for the mount point of ZFS filesystems but also that they're actually mounted, since ZFS can easily have un-mounted datasets due to eg replication in progress.

We have a variety of management scripts on our fileservers that do things on 'all ZFS filesystems on this fileserver' or 'a specific ZFS filesystem if it's hosted on this fileserver'. Generally they get their list of ZFS filesystems and their locations by looking at the mountpoint property (we set an explicit mount location for all of our ZFS filesystems, instead of using the default locations). Most of the time this works fine, but every so often one of the scripts has blown up and we've quietly fixed it to do better.

The problem is that ZFS filesystems can be visible in things like 'zfs list' and have a mountpoint property without actually being mounted. Most of the time all ZFS filesystems with a mountpoint will actually be mounted, so most of the time the simpler version works. However, every so often we're moving a filesystem around with 'zfs send' and 'zfs receive', and either an initial replication of the filesystem sits unmounted on its new home, or the old version of the now migrated filesystem sits unmounted on its old fileserver, retained for a while as a safety measure.

It's not hard to fix our scripts, but we have to find them (and then remember not to make this mistake again when we write new scripts). This time around I did do a sweep over all of our scripts looking for use of 'zfs list' and the 'mountpoint' property and so on, and didn't find anything where we (now) weren't also checking the 'mounted' property. Hopefully it will stay that way, now that I've written this entry to remind myself.

Sidebar: Two reasons other filesystems mostly don't have this problem

The obvious reason that other filesystems mostly don't have this problem is that they sort of don't have a state where they're present with a mount point assigned but not actually mounted. The less obvious reason is that most filesystems don't have a separate tool to list them; instead you look at the output of 'mount' or some other way of looking at what filesystems are mounted, and that obviously excludes filesystems that aren't. You can do the same with ZFS, but using 'zfs list' and so on is often more natural.

(With other filesystems, the rough equivalent is to have a 'noauto' filesystem in /etc/fstab that's not currently mounted. If you get your list of filesystems from fstab, you'll see the same sort of issue. Of course in practice you mostly don't look at fstab, since it doesn't reflect the live state of the system. Things in fstab may be unmounted, and things not in fstab may be mounted

solaris/ZFSCheckForMounted written at 22:46:00; Add Comment


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