Error messages

I love error messages, especially the ones that make you think that something else is wrong so you beat your head trying to bash the wrong thing into shape.

I spent quite a few hours trying to get a solaris jumpstart on a machine that is roughly 1200km from the jumpstart server to actually do the install.  This was a slow tedious process because the round trip time made everything take a long time.  The error I was getting was something like:

Error: Unable to create 9680Mb slice (unnamed)

and then a dump of the mbr and partition table of the disk in the machine.  Giving one the impression that somehow the solaris installer was objecting to the partitions/mbr currently on the disk.  No amount of clearing nor manually setting up of the partitions would make the error go away.

The real problem?  The fact that I had foolishly ASSuMEd that leaving the directive for creating a mirrored pool on a single disk machine would be harmless.... oh no.  What I think the error really meant was "you told me to make a mirror and I can't find another device to do that on".  It would have been nice if the error had been along the lines of "insufficient vdevs for mirror" or something along those lines.  After I removed the mirror option from the pool setup directive the error went away... *sigh*.