Hello to all,
my first post here. I hope following question won't be in inappropriate forum section.
I'm thinking about trying FreeBSD for small four drive NAS and use advantages of ZFS filesystem. Previously I've done bunch of similar NASes with Linux and dmraid. There I typically sliced all hard drives in a way, that start (eg. 10GB) of each drive in array was dedicated to system partitions and the rest was for user data. Then /boot partition, loader (and possibly also EFI FAT32 partition on some systems) were located at permanently connected USB flash drive, which was then set as a bootable in BIOS/EFI.
Such setup had two advantages, first it wasn't prone to hardware/BIOS related issues with booting when some drive failed (eg. stalled boot at half dead drive, which has highest boot priority) and second it wasn't necessary to do some manual syncing of loader or EFI partitions after each update of involved packages or kernel. Of course the flash drive is then also a single point of failure, but usually I haven't had any issues with that over years (seldom writes there, so very low wearout), plus you can prepare backup image if necessary.
I'm aware the first mentioned advantage is rather unrelated to used OS and depends just on used hardware, but what about the second thing? How does that work on FreeBSD with ZFS root?
For example if you use four drive NAS without additional USB drive and use guided installation for root on ZFS in bsdinstall, say with RAID-10 (two mirror vdevs). Will it install boot loader in a way, that each of those four drives will be bootable? Possibly does that survive system updates and release upgrades, so everything will be in sync?
Of course, I plan to do some further testing, just that topic came to my mind. I will be happy for comments with your experience.
Thanks,
Michal
my first post here. I hope following question won't be in inappropriate forum section.
I'm thinking about trying FreeBSD for small four drive NAS and use advantages of ZFS filesystem. Previously I've done bunch of similar NASes with Linux and dmraid. There I typically sliced all hard drives in a way, that start (eg. 10GB) of each drive in array was dedicated to system partitions and the rest was for user data. Then /boot partition, loader (and possibly also EFI FAT32 partition on some systems) were located at permanently connected USB flash drive, which was then set as a bootable in BIOS/EFI.
Such setup had two advantages, first it wasn't prone to hardware/BIOS related issues with booting when some drive failed (eg. stalled boot at half dead drive, which has highest boot priority) and second it wasn't necessary to do some manual syncing of loader or EFI partitions after each update of involved packages or kernel. Of course the flash drive is then also a single point of failure, but usually I haven't had any issues with that over years (seldom writes there, so very low wearout), plus you can prepare backup image if necessary.
I'm aware the first mentioned advantage is rather unrelated to used OS and depends just on used hardware, but what about the second thing? How does that work on FreeBSD with ZFS root?
For example if you use four drive NAS without additional USB drive and use guided installation for root on ZFS in bsdinstall, say with RAID-10 (two mirror vdevs). Will it install boot loader in a way, that each of those four drives will be bootable? Possibly does that survive system updates and release upgrades, so everything will be in sync?
Of course, I plan to do some further testing, just that topic came to my mind. I will be happy for comments with your experience.
Thanks,
Michal