Author name: Dan Langille

I've been playing with computers since I read an Elementary Electronics magazine way back in the 1970s. I started contributing to open source projects in 1998. After that, I gradually moved from being a software developer to being a systems administrator.

creating a raidz2 from 8x 4TB devices – here. we. go.

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It’s time. Time to create the 8x 4T raidz2 zpool. These are the devices: disks=”nda0 nda1 nda2 nda3 nda5 nda8 da12 da13″ In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 Check for existing partitions Using the list above: [18:15 r730-01 dvl ~] % gpart show | grep -E “nda0|nda1|nda2|nda3|nda5|nda8|da12|da13” => 40 7814037088 nda5 GPT (3.6T) => 34 7814037101 nda8 GPT (3.6T) Note I could not do this command because it fails at the first error: [18:05 […]

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Making room to creating a raidz2 from 8x 4TB devices – here. we. go.

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It’s time. Time to create the 8x 4T raidz2 zpool. That doesn’t happen in this post, hopefully the next one. But first, I have to move some stuff around, to free up all the 4TB devices. The host has 4 devices (NVMe) and I moved in two more, 4TB SSDs. From /var/log/messages: Dec 9 00:24:29 r730-01 kernel: mrsas0: System PD created target ID: 0xc Dec 9 00:24:29 r730-01 kernel: mrsas0: System PD created

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Adding gmirror swap to FreeBSD 14.3 – r730-01

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I recently migrated the zroot on r730-01 to a new pair of devices. I did not then configure swap for the swap partitions I set up. I’m going to do that now. I’m hoping this post from 8 years ago helps. In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 The first few sections include what’s in the system, and detects and fixes a few issues. Look for The real work near the bottom of the page.

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How to recover when booting to multiple zroots?

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On Nov 28, I rebooted r730-01 after an update, and it didn’t come back. At all. I had inserted 2x 4TB SSDS a few days earlier. It seems they contained remnants of a zroot. The host was trying to boot from them. I couldn’t get the host to boot from the real zroot. It frustrated me. I gave up and went to sleep later. The next morning, I moved those two drives into

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The latest SATADOM drives contained data when I got them

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Today I wanted to test some stuff with the newly obtained SATADOM SSDs. I was surprised to find they still had data on them. dvl@r730-04:~ $ gpart show ada1 => 63 242255601 ada1 MBR (116G) 63 1985 – free – (993K) 2048 495616 1 linux-data [active] (242M) 497664 193816576 2 linux-data (92G) 194314240 47939584 3 linux-data (23G) 242253824 1840 – free – (920K) Well, one of them at least. Let’s have a snoop.

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Creating a new zpool for r730-01

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Finally, it’s time to put together a new zpool for r730-01 (the storage information at that URL is already out of date; once this new zpool is created, another post will replace it). In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 I just realized, that my previous post on the zpools for this host revealed there is already a zpool with 2x 4TB NVMe: data02: [20:17 r730-01 dvl ~] % zpool list data02 NAME SIZE ALLOC

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Another pair of SATADOM devices

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Now that r730-01 is booting from SATADOM devices (which are directly attached to the M/B, thereby freeing up drives bays / PCIe slots for larger devices), I thought it wise to buy a second pair. For two reasons: The price of used devices was pretty good It’s good to have spares nearby In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 smartmontools-7.5 smartctl info Here is the SMART info. Next drive: My notes The power on hours

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r730-01 zpools

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This post documents the drive locations for zpools within r730-01. It will be replaced from time to time with a new post. To the left of a device is an indication of the drive physical location. Unused devices Unused drives/slots: Slots 12 & 13 each contain a 4TB SSD. Slots 14 and 15 are empty. Those drive cages are on the workbench and each hold a 2TB SSD. There are also NVMe devices

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Consolidating the disk space in r730-01

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I’m writing this up to have a starting point for when I come back to arrange the free space into zpools. This post might be the end-result of a request for donations for disk space etc that went out on 2025-08-29 – I was running short of space. Since then, donations (both cash and hardware) have helped me figure out that problem. After moving the zroot zpool onto a pair of SATADOM SSDs,

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prod – moving to a SATADOM based zpool (zroot) using zfs snapshot and send | recv

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In this post, I’m moving my zroot zpool from larger devices to smaller devices. Why? Well, the smaller devices happen to attach directly to the main board of my server, albeit with some slight modification to a fan cowl. There have been several recent posts regarding this topic. I tried a different zpool approach, where I added new devices to the zpool and removed the old devices. That worked. It wasn’t ideal for

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