On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 7:11 PM, Nicolas Williams <nicolas.willi...@sun.com> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 07:05:44PM +0000, Ross Smith wrote: >> > Absolutely. >> > >> > The tool shouldn't need to know that the backup disk is accessed via >> > USB, or whatever. The GUI should, however, present devices >> > intelligently, not as cXtYdZ! >> >> Yup, and that's easily achieved by simply prompting for a user >> friendly name as devices are attached. Now you could store that >> locally, but it would be relatively easy to drop an XML configuration >> file on the device too, allowing the same friendly name to be shown >> wherever it's connected. > > 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. > - let the user pick one. > > - 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) > > - another is to be much smarter about mapping topology to physical > slots and present a picture to the user that makes sense to the > user, so the user can click on the device they want. This is much > harder. 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. 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. 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. 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. That means the drive then functions as both a removable drive, and as a full backup for your system. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
