Add mirror to single ZFS disk

So you have FreeBSD a single drive ZFS machine and you want to add a second drive to mirror the first because it turns out it's now important. Yes, it's possible to do this after installation, even if you're booting off ZFS. Let's assume your first drive is ada0, and it's had the FreeBSD … Continue reading →

Set up FreeBSD in two mirrored drives using UFS

I’ve written about the virtues of Geom Mirror (gmirror) in the past. Geom Mirror was probably the best way of implementing redundant storage between FreeBSD 5.3 (2004) until ZFS was introduced in FreeBSD 7.0 in 2008. Even then, ZFS is heavyweight and the Geom Mirror was tested and more … Continue reading →

Configuring host names using DHCP

Background If you know all about DHCP, feel free to skip this bit. In the Unix world the network administrator assigns every host (networked computer) the stuff in needs to operate on the network - it's name and IP address. Other hosts can find it by looking its name up on the DNS server (or … Continue reading →

ZFS In-place disk size upgrade

Everyone knows that you can replace the drives in a ZFS vdev with larger ones one a time, and when the last one is inserted it automagically uses the extra space, right? But who’s actually done this? It does actually work, kind of. However, small scale ZFS users are booting from ZFS, and … Continue reading →

FreeBSD ZFS RAIDZ failed disk replacement

(for the rest of us) I don’t know about you but most of my ZFS arrays are large, using SAS drives connected via SAS HBAs to expanders that know which disk is where. I also have multiple redundancy in the zpool and hot spares, so I don’t need pay a visit just to replace a failed disk. And … Continue reading →

Frank Leonhardt's Blog

Life, with Technology

Add mirror to single ZFS disk

Set up FreeBSD in two mirrored drives using UFS

Configuring host names using DHCP

ZFS In-place disk size upgrade

FreeBSD ZFS RAIDZ failed disk replacement