I’ve been having boot issues with a server containing 20 HDD, all behind HBAs. I have decided to start booting off SSDs. In that previous blog post, there was much speculation about where to mount the new drives, etc. In the meantime, I came up with a solution which did not involve magnets and used a pair of INTEL 730 SSDs I had in another chassis. Let’s start with how I configured those […]
Moving boot from one zpool to another Read More »
For future reference, this is the knew server. It runs a few jails, including Bacula regression testing services. This recent post outlines the modifications so it boots off a mirror of SSDs. File systems Paritions zpools /var/run/dmesg.boot
I’m using Bacula 9.0.3 for this post, on FreeBSD 10.3 and 11.1. I did not document this as I went along, however, the details should be enough to get you started. NOTE: when I refer to the bacula-sd configuration, I mean the bacula-sd in question, not necessarily on the same server as bacula-dir. This will hopefully make you think carefully about which file you are modifying. NOTE: I am moving a whole Bacula
Bacula – ran out of space, moved some volumes to another zpool Read More »
For future reference, this is the knew server. It runs a few jails, including Bacula regression testing services. File systems Paritions zpools /var/run/dmesg.boot
This is about FreeBSD 11.1 on my knew server. I recently replaced the 3TB drives with 5TB drives. Along the way, it didn’t boot, the swap was adjusted, I got concerned about power, and there was a brief CAM status: SCSI Status Error scare. Then today, the planned reboot, I started asking questions on Reddit and on Twitter. The booting issue BIOS cannot boot from drives which present only 4096-byte sectors. This is
Booting off the new 5TB drives Read More »
I started replacing 3TB drives with 5TB drives in a 10 drive raidz3 array on a FreeBSD 10.3 box. I was not sure which drive tray to pull, so I powered off the server, and, one by one, pulled the drive tray, photographed it, and reinserted the drive tray. No changes were made. The first reboot Upon powering up, I was greeted by this (I have typed out the text for search purposes):
After replacing 3TB drive with 5TB drive, FreeBSD 10.3 system did not reboot Read More »
In this power, the server is running FreeBSD 10.3. I am completely and unreasonably biased: ZFS is the best filesystem out there. Do not take my word for it. Ask around. Today, I started a process I’ve been waiting to do for a while. I am replacing the 3TB drives in a 10-drive raidz2 array with 5TB drives. These new drives are faster, I think perhaps cooler, and, more to the point, bigger.
Swapping 5TB in, 3TB out Read More »
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
Creating an Apple Time Capsule using FreeBSD & ZFS Read More »
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
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.
Adding SLOG to a zpool Read More »