A week ago, I’ve migrated my gateway to a standalone machine running FreeBSD 13.1. The whole process was certainly flawless and soon enough it was forwarding packets to and from my network.
Quite happy with the result, I didn’t expect it to crash less than 2 days after its first production hour. At first I thought it could have been the temperature, the graphic card, the memory… until it crashed again a couple of days after and I saw this:
Because I ran gpart bootcode on the wrong partition of every replacement disk I swapped and because my motherboard is incapable of finding an EFI partition, I basically bricked my FreeBSD NAS / gateway.
It took me a ridiculous amount of time in order to find how to boot into an existing ZFS FreeBSD installation from a FreeBSD LiveCD (I used mini-memstick).
Finally, in a 2014 thread from the FreeBSD questions mailing list, someone mentioned the magic invocation, and from there I deducted the remaining parts.
Maybe I can’t read, but I have the feeling that official documentations explain every single corner case for a given tool, except the one you will actually need. My today’s struggle: replacing a disk within a FreeBSD ZFS pool.
What? there’s a shitton of docs on this topic! Are you stupid?
I don’t know, maybe. Yet none covered the process in a simple, straight and complete manner. Here’s the story:
Since yesterday I felt my personal FreeBSD NAS was sluggish, and this morning, I saw those horrible messages popping in my syslog console:
At ${DAYJOB} I’m using a FreeBSD workstation for quite a while. Everything goes smoothly except for the filesystem. When I first installed it, I chose UFS because FreeBSD installer said that root-on-ZFS was “experimental”. I later learned that nobody uses UFS anymore and that root-on-ZFS is perfectly stable. Thing is, I chose UFS and I deeply regret it. Not because of ZFS’s features that absolutely do not matter for me on the desktop, but because FreeBSD implementation of UFS is terribly, terribly slow when it comes to manipulate big files. When I say slow, I mean that pkg upgrade tends to FREEZE the entire machine while extracting archives. That slow. And before you ask, yes, there’s been a lot of tuning on that side.
Au boulot, j’ai mis en place un NAS. À force de lire les louanges de ZFS, je me suis dit que c’était l’occasion idéale d’utiliser réellement ses capacités, et plus simplement comme “le filesystem de Solaris/OpenSolaris”.
Nous sommes partis de l’hypothèse suivante :
Le serveur que nous utilisons pour ce setup comporte une carte HP de type Smart Array g6, dont le firmware ne permet pas de mode JBOD, aussi, chaque disque formera une unité logique RAID0.