ZFS

Booting off the new 5TB drives

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 […]

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After replacing 3TB drive with 5TB drive, FreeBSD 10.3 system did not reboot

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):

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Swapping 5TB in, 3TB out

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.

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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NOTE: this post has been replaced by a newer version.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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