ZFS

Creating an Apple Time Capsule using FreeBSD & ZFS

First, all credit goes to Mark Felder’s blog post upon which this is based. You can buy an Apple Time Capsule (I did) to back up your Mac. Now that I have two MacBook’s, I have run out of space, so now I want to backup to ZFS. By backing up to my ZFS filesystem: I am no longer constrained to the capacity of a single disk I can backup my backups to […]

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x8dtu

NOTE: this post has been replaced by a newer version. The older post is still available This is x8dtu (named after the Supermicro motherboard). This will be the new FreshPorts server. In short: FreeBSD 11 booting off a mirrored pair of zfsroot SSDs 4.5TB of mirrored ZFS 196612 MB of RAM (yeah, that’s 196GB of RAM) Supermicro X8TDU motherboard Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40GHz (two of those, giving 16 CPUs) NOTE: this post

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Adding SLOG to a zpool

I have recently added two 480 GB SSDs to a 10 x HDD raidz2 system. The SSDs will be mainly used for spooling to tape during backups, but I’m going to use a small part of it for a SLOG. Not all systems benefits from a SLOG (Separate intent LOG), but synchronous writes, such as databases, do. All ZFS systems have a ZIL (ZFS Intent Log); it is usually part of the zpool.

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Importing a zpool and renaming it

Last night, I moved a SAS card and had to renumber some devices. I also moved two SSDs into the same box (see photos). Those SSDs were the boot drives from the system from which I pulled the SAS drive. That box, tape01, contains the Bacula configuration file I need for this new box. I know, I know. Why not use Bacula to restore that file. That would be too easy. I want

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Adding a failed HDD back into a ZFS mirror

I do have a FreeBSD-11 box, cuppy: $ uname -a FreeBSD cuppy.int.unixathome.org 11.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #0 r279394: Sat Feb 28 21:01:21 UTC 2015 dan@cuppy.unixathome.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64 $ That box is used mostly for testing and/or erasing DLT tapes. The current status of that box is not healthy. It’s running fine, but it is not optimal: Let’s fix this. Background Why is one drive upset? Because I installed FreeBSD onto it. Why? I don’t know,

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Added new drive when existing one gave errors, then zpool replace

In this post, I am working with FreeBSD 10.2 on this server. Over the past few days, a 3 year old drive has been giving errors. The number of errors has been constant, but I have a spare drive here, so I decided to replace it. I have verified that it is out of warranty. Rather than pull the error drive and replace it, I opted to add in a new drive and

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smartd: Device: /dev/ada0, 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors persists

That smartd: Device: /dev/ada0, 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors problem which arose on Sunday is still around. I’ve run a short test, a long test, and a ZFS scrub is now underway. I may just replace the drive. $ sudo smartctl -P show /dev/ada0 smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE-p9 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org Drive found in smartmontools Database. Drive identity strings: MODEL: TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 FIRMWARE:

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Using a Dell TL4000 with Bacula’s bacula-sd on FreeBSD with ZFS

Last night, I managed to install new (but used) SAS cables for my Dell TL4000 on the tape01 server. I managed to get bacula-sd running, but I was unable to communicate with it from bacula-dir, via bconsole on my laptop. Eventually, I ran bacula-sd from the command line in the foreground and with debugging and saw things which needed to be corrected. In this post, I will adjust permissions on devices get bacula-dir

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Deleting files from /usr/, breaking your system, then recovering

Yes, this was not fun. I took some notes, but not everything. Please read the notes if you plan on doing these foolish things. I was cleaning up /usr/src on a host which does not hold src. I looked and found: It was there that I knew I’d done the wrong thing. Trying snapshots Let’s look for snapshots, find one from a few minutes ago, and rollback to that. $ zfs list -t

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