No space left on device? (metainit)

Here comes another rant about error messages. I was rebuilding a server today that uses SVM to manage som SAN storage which gives a home to four very nice Solaris zones. I began by issuing a metainit command to build a concat/stripe device from these two SAN devices...

testbox{lvm}$ sudo metainit -f d100
metainit: testbox: /etc/lvm/md.tab line 72: c4t6006048000018775125753594D433742d0s7: No space left on device


What?!?! I took a quick look at partitioning...

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
1 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
2 backup wu 0 - 56653 25.93GB (56654/0/0) 54387840
3 unassigned wm 1 - 3 1.41MB (3/0/0) 2880
4 unassigned wm 4 - 56653 25.93GB (56650/0/0) 54384000
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
7 - wu 0 - 56653 25.93GB (56654/0/0) 54387840


Ok, so the partition exists. What the heck is wrong?

In my absent minded hurry to get this trivial task completed I made an undiscipined assumption that both devices which are to comprise d100 have the same underlying VTOC. It turns out they did not. One of them was set up to use slice 4, and the other slice 7.

So, I issued a quick command to synchronize them using the traditional prtvtoc | fmthard tango, then edited the /etc/lvm/md.tab file to accomodate the s4 slice when defining d100. This time it worked nicely.

But come on, "no space left on device?" What kind of an error message is that? How about something more like, "specified slice does not exist." Technically, a storage device of size zero would have no space available, but there sure are more direct ways to express that concept.