[Ukfreebsd] nice little storage server for 112GBP

[Mark Blackman]

On 2 Jan 2011, at 22:52, Ceri Davies wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 05:37:59PM +0000, Dr Joe Karthauser wrote:
>> 
>> Shame it only takes 4 disks. I've a 5 disk zraid2 here - but the box is too thirsty. I'd love to replace it.
> 
> Does FreeBSD boot from raidz or raidz2 then?

Yes, but very non-standard install.

In fact, as far as I can tell, the "best practice" procedure for FreeBSD 8
install has migrated well away from what I'm used to (and away
from sysinstall as well)

This post summarizes the general idea pretty well.

http://www.b0rken.org/freebsd/zfs.html

I've done that install a couple of times now, but modified for raidz1 (raidz)
without issue.

The 3 most outstanding features are

1) the use of the AHCI drivers in preference to the boring old ATA ones.
2) GPT partition tables (instead of MBR) plus glue to boot from ZFS
   a. freebsd-boot partition
   b. freebsd-swap partition
   c. freebsd-zfs partition
3) booting straight into ZFS instead of UFS

There's this mfsBSD install ISO as well which does the same I believe
in a single script.

- Mark