Open Source

Creating a backup boot drive from a zroot mirror

Today, using FreeBSD 14.3, I’m going to test booting from a drive which is a mirror of the boot drives. This is what I’m booting from: root@r730-04:~ # zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT zroot 923G 1.72G 921G – – 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE – root@r730-04:~ # zpool status zroot pool: zroot state: ONLINE scan: resilvered 3.74M in 00:00:01 with 0 errors on Thu Nov 20 […]

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gpart backup | gpart restore does not alway give you exact replication

Today I was setting up some drives for testing. I did this manually: root@r730-04:~ # gpart create -s gpt da2 da2 created root@r730-04:~ # gpart add -t efi -s 260M -a 4k da2 da2p1 added root@r730-04:~ # gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 8G -a 4k da2 da2p2 added root@r730-04:~ # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -a 4k da2 da2p3 added root@r730-04:~ # gpart show da2 => 40 62533216 da2 GPT (30G) 40 532480 1

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Moving a zpool to larger drives #ZFS #FreeBSD

It is a rainy Wednesday morning and I’m drinking a cappuccino in my favorite cafe. A five minute walk from here, in the basement of an 1890 Victorian twin house, sits r730-04. Last weekend, I configured it to boot from two SATADOM drives. Today, I’ll move that zpool to a pair of larger drives. I’ve done that move before and it is a common procedure for increasing zpool capacity. Later today, I’ll move

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Duplicating partitions to a larger drive #ZFS #FreeBSD

As I was writing a different blog post, I came across this interesting situation. I couldn’t create the same partition layout on the new drive. This is the existing drive: root@r730-04:~ # gpart show ada0 => 40 242255584 ada0 GPT (116G) 40 532480 1 efi (260M) 532520 2008 – free – (1.0M) 534528 16777216 2 freebsd-swap (8.0G) 17311744 224942080 3 freebsd-zfs (107G) 242253824 1800 – free – (900K) root@r730-04:~ # I started to

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Using SATADOM drives in a Dell R730

A recent goal is to increase the available storage space in my main development server in the basement. To that end, two recent posts: r730-01: the drive replacement plan r730-01: storage plan The SATADOM devices I purchased are meant to be plugged directly into the M/B of the server. This approach will free up two PCIe slots which were hosting 2x 2.5″ SSDs in a hot-swap adaptor (the post mentions a Dell R720;

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PostgreSQL: MD5 password support is deprecated – updating the user passwords

Eight years ago, PostgreSQL introduced scram-sha-256 hashes for passwords. Eleven months ago, MD5 was deprecated. Yesterday, I got caught up with all this. Some of this post will deal with how I fixed it, but mostly it is documenting (for myself) what I did. The fix covers several services and takes place over multiple days. First, some background on why this change has come into focus for me. I have a FreeBSD jail

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What will I do with those 2 x 1TB drives?

During zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs I replace 2x 1TB drives with 2x 4TB drives. This afternoon as I was taking laundry down to the basement, I realized: I have two unused drives in the host. Either I remove them or I repurpose them. I know I have 4x 1TB drives (two SSDs and two NVMe). I could make a 2TB mirror out of them. Where can I use them? r730-03

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zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs

If you read my recent posts, I’m replacing an existing zpool with new devices. At first, I went to copy the old zpool to a new zpool. I then decided instead of copying, to replace. I’m also going to see about compression. I’m sure it won’t take effect, because replace is a block-by-block copy, or so I think. We’ll confirm. Before Here is the zpool, really, just the top-level filesystem. Notice how compression

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Moving a zpool to new devices – after the syncoid copy – oh wait, zfs replace

This morning, as I was typing the subject of this blog post, I realized I don’t have to do this copying. The new devices are staying in this host. It is better for me to add the new devices to the zpool and remove the old devices. That is so much easier. The existing zpool can stay in use and there is no interruption in service. NOTE: after publishing this entry, I realized

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