any known issues with USB at the moment? I have a couple of external disks I use for backups which now both get faulted and taken out of service when I plug them in.

not that I know of, though jclulow was fixing weird usb3 things.

blepe: What distribution are you running?

and version

SunOS cube 5.11 omnios-r151042-73702cd512 i86pc i386 i86pc

I wouldn't rule out a hardware fault. Just thought I'd ask before I started taking things apart

It could really be lots of different things. Can you gist/pastebin some of the errors and log messages and tool output you're seeing?

will do

with external USB disks, can there be concern for power? do they accept (and have attached) additional power feeds, or only get juice over USB?

I have an USB hub powered separately to drive the disks, some also powered others not

sometimes the hub disables random ports because it is overwhelmed

anything like this rings a bell?

these are powered only over USB. They've both worked on that host for a long time

things age, resistances increase :)

FWIW if possible, might help to cross-check with another OS (livecd?) just to make sure it is more likely an illumos issue (PM?) than HW fault