Re: Question of installing over SAS controller and USB flash

Hey Warner,
the box is very featureLESS (an old Xyratex HS-1235T box, as far as I researched it).
T2029_QR v1.3.ai (hackspace.org.uk)<https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/w/images/b/b2/HS-1235T-ATX_Quick_Reference_Sheet.pdf>
(5) Xyratex 0944037-03 Motherboard Mystery SOLVED : homelab (reddit.com)<https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/8loge6/xyratex_094403703_motherboard_mystery_solved/>

Through the POST process and the BIOS there is no option to get into the SAS controller and enable its BIOS. I would love to install FreeBSD directly on the drives and not to deal with the flash card, but I suppose the lack of controller BIOS is the reason the box comes with reader and card directly.

As I'm new to FreeBSD and ZFS I'm struggling to set up the partitioning. I was thinking to:

  1.  Partition the entire FLASH card (4gigs) on MBR with freebsd-ufs and mount /boot. As I've read there should not be ESP (efi) partition as this is flash, thus MBR, which is "legacy" and without ESP.
  2.  Partition one of the drives (3tera) with GPT, freebsd-zfs stripe and mount /
  3.  When the system is up and running, add the rest of the drives (11 more) to the pool and change the pool to RAIDZ2. However I'm not sure this is possible, to change the type of the pool without erasing everything. Logical thinking says it is not possible.
  4.  After all of these comes the mounting of filesystems and creating fstab to continue the installation, which is full darkness at the moment, as I'm still struggling with the initial start and not have read anything on that.

All of these should be done in shell with the gpart utility during install and I cannot figure out, how to make points 2 and 3 on one go having directly the RAIDZ2.


________________________________
From: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org <owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> on behalf of Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2023 00:20
To: azathanai@icloud.com <azathanai@icloud.com>
Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Question of installing over SAS controller and USB flash



On Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 2:36 PM azathanai@icloud.com<mailto:azathanai@icloud.com> <azathanai@icloud.com<mailto:azathanai@icloud.com>> wrote:
Hi all,
a newbie in FreeBSD here trying to install a RAIDZ2 on a server with mps SAS controller with drives which are not visible in the boot order in BIOS.
So, I cannot install directly on the drives, despite that the installer "sees" them, because the BIOS does not see the controller and its drives as option.

Have you enabled the BIOS on the mps card itself? Otherwise it won't install a BIOS fragment to run at boot, and the drives won't be seen.

On the other hand, I have a card reader with a flash card on it (4gigs) from which I can boot and where I can have my /boot partition with the kernel.
I've a lot of questions and I still cannot find the answers to most of them, despite going through the handbook, the boot process explanation, the installation process handbook and a lot of more reading.


  *   How should the flash card be partitioned and with what mountpoints? The server is BIOS capable.
  *   How should the rest of the drives be partitioned with ZFS and the mountpoints? The standard configuration from the installer on RAIDZ2 is good for me.

I've experience with Linux but is not helping a lot here. The setup looks quite different .... probably because of the ZFS.

Any help, links, ideas and comments will be much appreciated!

That's a workaround, but you should be able to enable the BIOS part of the mps/mpr cards and boot off them. I've done that before.

Warner


Cyberly yours,
deragoth