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ZFS-only installation of FreeBSD 11.0 from DVD
FreeBSD 10+ comes with a built-in ZFS-on-root support in its installer, but that one still uses the pesky “/ROOT” filesystem as well as mountpoint hacks for all top-level children like /tmp, /var, /usr and so on, all of which with no apparent benefit-or if there is one, it is horribly undocumented. This article describes an alternative setup that ( Read more... ) -
Quick tip: Figuring out which ZFS snapshot is older (of the same dataset)
Task at hand: You have two snapshots, say mypool/myfs@omgwtf and mypool/myfs@kthxbye, and you need to know which one predates the other. A common trick is to compare their creation property, which is essentially their timestamp.
Problem: creation property isn't reliable, because system clock (from which its value is captured) may go back in time ( Read more... ) -
ZFS-only installation of FreeBSD 9.0 from DVD
This is a step-by-step guide, mostly for my own reference, but you might find this useful too.
Disclaimer: This article is about clean installation of operating system, where “clean” means that, if you follow these instructions, all existing contents of the hard drive will be destroyed. Do not follow these instructions except on an empty hard ( Read more... ) -
ZFS-only installation of FreeBSD from DVD, with encrypted root pool
This is a step-by-step guide, mostly for my own reference, but you might find this useful too.
Disclaimer: This article is about clean installation of operating system, where “clean” means that, if you follow these instructions, all existing contents of the hard drive will be destroyed. Do not follow these instructions except on an empty hard ( Read more... ) -
SCSI pass-through devices disappearing immediately in FreeBSD guest
This article first describes a problem of VMware ESXi 3.5 (other versions may be affected as well; feedback appreciated) which causes host-side SCSI devices, when connected to a FreeBSD guest via SCSI pass-through, to disappear immediately, presents a workaround, and discusses why it happens.
( tl;dr ) -
Adding a new disk to a ZFS root pool on FreeBSD
Again, this is mostly for my own reference, but if you have the same problem that I had, this article may prove useful to you as well.
OpenSolaris (from which FreeBSD's ZFS codebase came from) has this limitation: The “root” pool (i.e. the one that contains a boot filesystem, specified in the bootfs pool property) can only be a simple pool or a ( Read more... ) -
ZFS-only installation of FreeBSD 8.1 from DVD
Update: If you also want to encrypt everything except /boot, refer to this version.
Update: This works for FreeBSD 8.2 as well.
This is a step-by-step guide, mostly for my own reference, but you might find this useful too.
Disclaimer: This article is about clean installation of operating system, where “clean” means that, if you follow these ( Read more... ) -
*meows*
*scratches 19" server rack frames* -
*purrs*
Now that I have my new blog (bluewhitelv if you want to add) in place, I decided to turn this journal into a stream of silly one-liners. So…
Meow.
