Moving FreeBSD from UFS to a mirrored ZFSroot

S

ser22

Hi all! ?

I recently installed FreeBSD using some old hardware I got my hands on

Code: 
% uname -a
FreeBSD sparky 13.0-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p1 #0: Wed May 26 22:15:09 UTC 2021

Nothing fancy, just a small boot disk and a 3 disk ZFS raidz

Code: 
% gpart show ada0
=>       40  976773088  ada0  GPT  (466G)
         40       1024     1  freebsd-boot  (512K)
       1064  968883192     2  freebsd-ufs  (462G)
  968884256    7888872     3  freebsd-swap  (3.8G)

I installed sysutils/iocage and created some jails (FAMP stack) in order to learn more about it.
Because I don't trust very much the old disks I'm using, I thought it could be interesting to add a second disk and mirror both as described here.

At this stage, reinstalling from scratch wouldn't be a problem, but I'm curious how other users with more experience would approach such a migration, best practices, etc.

I have a Linux background, but I'm trying to escape the distro nightmare ;)
 
In your situation it is probably best to use the FreeBSD installer and let it install a ZFS-based boot disk. This will do all the steps automatically.

Note that the wiki page that you mentioned is more than 4 years old and refers to an older version of FreeBSD + ZFS. Some things have changed and should be done differently today. For example, gptzfsboot is for legacy BIOS only. Even if you have old hardware that uses legacy BIOS for booting, it is probably a good idea to install a system in a way that supports UEFI booting, in case you move the disk to a newer PC some day, so you don’t have to reinstall again.
 
olli@ said:
In your situation it is probably best to use the FreeBSD installer and let it install a ZFS-based boot disk. This will do all the steps automatically.

Note that the wiki page that you mentioned is more than 4 years old and refers to an older version of FreeBSD + ZFS. Some things have changed and should be done differently today. For example, gptzfsboot is for legacy BIOS only. Even if you have old hardware that uses legacy BIOS for booting, it is probably a good idea to install a system in a way that supports UEFI booting, in case you move the disk to a newer PC some day, so you don’t have to reinstall again.
Click to expand...

You're right olli@

I checked again, and the FreeBSD installer is indeed capable of creating a mirrored zroot out of the box as I wanted.

Code: 
% zpool status
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
config:

    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    tank        ONLINE       0     0     0
      ada0      ONLINE       0     0     0
      ada1      ONLINE       0     0     0
      ada2      ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

  pool: zroot
 state: ONLINE
config:

    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ada3p3  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ada4p3  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

I just need now to explore the best way of "moving" my previous setup, including the iocage jails, to this new layout.
:-/
 
If you are short on drives, you can also install ZFS using the installer to a single drive "stripe," then add a second drive to create a mirror afterwards. It's easy to do.

Also, iocage has export and import options that have worked for me in the past.
 
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