On Sun, 27 Jan 2013, Reginald Beardsley wrote:
Several people have suggested FreeBSD for the OS for my N40L based ZFS server
and using the internal USB socket w/ a flash drive for the OS However, after
trying FreeBSD 9.0 installed to an HDD, I'm not enthused about having to
relearn FreeBSD admin. And I'm not GUI admin inclined. I'd prefer to stick w/
what I'm most familiar with.
However, the idea has considerable attraction. Has anyone done such a thing w/
OI? A bunch of stuff would need to move out of rpool so that it was almost
R/O, but I don't see any major obstacles. I assume the LiveCD uses a memory
filesystem for these, so I'd expect it to be pretty straight forward.
This still leaves the single point of failure for the root pool, but copies=2+
might give enough warning to avoid a crisis. Creating a replacement from a
disk image using dd would be pretty painless.
Any reports of success or failure? I've seen rather poor USB flash
performance, but that might be hardware specific.
I found some USB drives were slower than others and some (eg a Verbatim
black "pinstripe" USB stick, for example) would not accept a UFS
filesystem at all. I'm now using Intenso Rainbow Blue 4 GB flash drives on
all my FreeBSD 9.0 installs on N40L servers.
USB drives used as system disks will be slow unless you put the /tmp and
/var filesystems on memory filesystems (MFS). Here's what I do on my
FBSD servers:
1. boot system up normally (with or without the ZFS pool
on the mechanical hard disks, it doesn't matter)
2. tar up the existing /var and /tmp filesystems and save them
somewhere on the USB filesystem, eg in /md_backups
3. disable the automatic start-up of syslogd and devd daemons
by editing /etc/defaults/rc.conf and making sure it has the
following lines in it:
devd_enable="NO"
and
syslogd_enable="NO"
4. now add this to the /etc/rc.local script:
# Create memory filesystems
cd /
mdmfs -s 500m md0 /tmp
tar xzpf /md_backups/tmp.tgz
mdmfs -s 500m md1 /var
tar xzpf /md_backups/var.tgz
# Start syslogd and devd daemons
/etc/rc.d/syslogd onestart
/etc/rc.d/devd onestart
echo '.'
exit 0
(this creates two 500 MB memory filesystems /dev/md0 and /dev/md1
and mounts them on /var and /tmp and unpacks the preserved /var
and /tmp filesystems frm the tar.gz backups and then starts the
devd and syslod daemons.
5. next, to preserve the state of /var and /tmp across reboots
add this to your /etc/rc.shutdown.local script (you might need
to create this if it doesn't exist):
# Insert other shutdown procedures here
tar czf /md_backups/var.tgz /var
tar czf /md_backups/tmp.tgz /tmp
echo '.'
exit 0
6. finally, use the 'noatime' parameter in your /etc/fstab to
prevent commiands like ls, etc from continually re-reading the
contents of / - my /etc/fstab looks like this:
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
/dev/da0p2 / ufs rw,noatime 1
1
/dev/da0p3 /var ufs rw 2 2
/dev/da0p4 /tmp ufs rw 2 2
This works a treat - the MFS is really fast and you wouldn't know the
system disk was a USB drive.
By the way, I'm buying some new N36Ls cheap for my own use so will have a
crack at getting OI 151a running on a USB drive.
cheers, Andy
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