[geeks] BSD Questions

[Mike Meredith]

Hi

Thanks for the answers ...

On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:30:51 -0600 (CST), Jonathan Patschke wrote:
> There are some caveats, but I've found FreeBSD 8.1 with ZFS to be
> perfectly stable.  I use it at home, and $ork uses it in production.

I guess there's no worries then.

> The biggest caveat is that the installer does not support installing
> 
> To do a ZFS-root install by hand, grab the 'DVD 1' image of 8.1 or
> 8.2-RC3 and follow these instructions:
>    http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot

Looks like the prettified version of what I used. I don't know if I did
anything wrong, but there's a section in it that says do :-

  for dir in base catpages dict doc games info lib32 manpages ports
  do 
    (cd $dir ; ./install.sh)
  done

... which I had to repeat with a "./install.sh all" (or nothing was
actually installed).

> That how-to goes a little crazy with ZFS options in /var.  There's

It is a little old school taken to the extremes that ZFS lets you :) 

> i386) for ZFS.  FreeBSD's facilities for running i386 binaries on an
> amd64 kernel aren't really up to par with Solaris or OS X, but
> they're mostly usable.

I'm pretty sure there's nothing I run on my server that couldn't be
build from the ports collection. No binaries to worry about.

> Tracking -STABLE is usually pretty safe, but 8.2 is going to be out
> in a matter of days, which has ZFS pool version 15 and FS version 4.
> Is that new enough for your needs?

Wants not needs. And no, deduplication is in pool version 20. No
biggie ... I'll probably just run the release version, unless I get
interested.

> just a ZFS snapshot), since there's no way to update the basis for a
> clone and then reapply snapshotted changes.

Yep ... clones and snapshots are tricky. I'll not be backing up the os
itself anyway; merely making sure the important configuration files are
in a Subversion repository.

> > And anything else that seems worth mentioning!
> 
> Avoid putting swap on ZFS.  You already need a separate GPT slice for

I kind of wondered why the instructions suggested a separate swap slice
rather than a ZFS volume, but went with the suggestion anyway.


-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
 religeous conviction
  -- Blaise Pascal