I've been running a TrueNAS Core system for several years and am now finally ready to acknowledge that it's at an end, and I now need to replace it with a long-term successor. I'm intrigued by the future of the zVault project but am not quite ready to commit. I'm also encouraged by the recent updates in 15.0-RELEASE and am tempted to just assemble the packages I need from the base system.
My current hardware is a Mini-ITX system with four 3.5" drive bays attached to all four SATA ports on the motherboard. As such, the boot/OS volume has been an internal USB flash drive as originally prescribed by the TrueNAS project. That's been working out well, and I hope to continue that with the new install. I've procured a fresh USB drive for the install.
I'm booting the installer from USB flash using the DVD image. So, during the install two USB flash drives are present (recognized as da0 and da1) as well as the SATA hard disks.
During my first initial attempts, I get to the point in the installer where disks are configured and trying both guided and manual layout, the installer seems to presume that it can use all disks and proposes fresh layouts for all of them including the SATA disks and the installer flash drive. Since there's existing data on the SATA disks, I'm hoping there's a way to exclude those from configuration, at least during the install. But it's also odd that it would include the install media.
And in fact, after reconfiguring the SATA disks as disconnected in the BIOS, I completed an install and attempted to reboot with just the target flash drive and it didn't get far as it was expecting the installer flash to also be present. I attempt to 'revert' or otherwise change the proposed disk layout to not include the installer source media, but it complains that it cannot be changed presumably because it's the current boot media. I suspect this would not be an issue if I was in fact using a real DVD-R disc. I've also tried the memstick image, but there's no difference there.
So, at this point, I'm looking for overall guidance on the best way to install a basic FreeBSD server to a USB flash drive from a USB flash drive, or any other suggestions on how to get the installer to be more flexible on how it arranges filesystems on disks.
Thanks!
My current hardware is a Mini-ITX system with four 3.5" drive bays attached to all four SATA ports on the motherboard. As such, the boot/OS volume has been an internal USB flash drive as originally prescribed by the TrueNAS project. That's been working out well, and I hope to continue that with the new install. I've procured a fresh USB drive for the install.
I'm booting the installer from USB flash using the DVD image. So, during the install two USB flash drives are present (recognized as da0 and da1) as well as the SATA hard disks.
During my first initial attempts, I get to the point in the installer where disks are configured and trying both guided and manual layout, the installer seems to presume that it can use all disks and proposes fresh layouts for all of them including the SATA disks and the installer flash drive. Since there's existing data on the SATA disks, I'm hoping there's a way to exclude those from configuration, at least during the install. But it's also odd that it would include the install media.
And in fact, after reconfiguring the SATA disks as disconnected in the BIOS, I completed an install and attempted to reboot with just the target flash drive and it didn't get far as it was expecting the installer flash to also be present. I attempt to 'revert' or otherwise change the proposed disk layout to not include the installer source media, but it complains that it cannot be changed presumably because it's the current boot media. I suspect this would not be an issue if I was in fact using a real DVD-R disc. I've also tried the memstick image, but there's no difference there.
So, at this point, I'm looking for overall guidance on the best way to install a basic FreeBSD server to a USB flash drive from a USB flash drive, or any other suggestions on how to get the installer to be more flexible on how it arranges filesystems on disks.
Thanks!
