ZFS NAS configuration question

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Dan Naumov wrote:
> USB root partition for booting off UFS is something I have
> considered. I have looked around and it seems that all the "install
> FreeBSD onto USB stick" guides seem to involve a lot of manual work
> from a fixit environment, does sysinstall not recognise USB drives as
> a valid disk device to parition/label/install FreeBSD on? If I do go
> with an USB boot/root, what things I should absolutely keep on it and
> which are "safe" to move to a ZFS pool? The idea is that in case my
> ZFS configuration goes bonkers for some reason, I still have a fully
> workable singleuser configuration to boot from for recovery.

It should see them as SCSI disks, note that if you plug them in after 
the installer boots you will need to go into Options and tell it to 
rescan the devices.

> I haven't really used USB flash for many years, but I remember when
> they first started appearing on the shelves, they got well known for
> their horrible reliability (stick would die within a year of use,
> etc). Have they improved to the point of being good enough to host a
> root partition on, without having to setup some crazy GEOM mirror
> setup using 2 of them?

I would expect one to last a long time if you only use it for /boot and 
use ZFS for the rest (or even just moving /var onto ZFS would save 
heaps of writes).

Also, you could setup 2 USB sticks (install on one then dd onto the 
other) so you have a cold spare.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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