[rescue] OS for ZFS?

[Joshua D. Boyd]

Scott Newell <newell+rescue at n5tnl.com> wrote:

>I'm wanting to build a (headless) machine to play with ZFS.  It won't 
>be doing much--light duty file server, some monitoring scripts, rsync 
>backups of our VPS, etc.  Looking through the junk pile here at work, 
>I see an Ultra 60 (2 CPU, 1 or 2 GB ram, couple of drives) or an old 
>Dell Precision workstation (2.8GHz P4, 512 MB, couple of old SATA 
>drives).  Does either feel like a viable candidate?

If the p4 is 64 bit, then it is viable.  Otherwise, it will be slow and may be less stable.

The u60 can be used with Solaris 10.  That is a fairly old zfs version, but it is stable.  It should be usable with OpenSXCE, which is a bit of a fringe Illumos based OS.  It also should be usable with FreeBSD.  With any of those OSs, you can add a LSI SAS card (1068 chip set, be sure not to get hardware raid, and you may need to flash the firmware if it comes with old -R firmware) to use SAS or SATA disks in the U60.