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Date:      Tue, 2 Jun 2009 18:45:26 +0930
From:      "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Cc:        Gerrit =?utf-8?q?K=C3=BChn?= <gerrit@pmp.uni-hannover.de>, Dan Naumov <dan.naumov@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: ZFS NAS configuration question
Message-ID:  <200906021845.33739.doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <cf9b1ee00906020146q149b5c8aq57759917784ff58@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <cf9b1ee00905301141t1945c053x43ce915b7085326e@mail.gmail.com> <20090602095228.8ff3654c.gerrit@pmp.uni-hannover.de> <cf9b1ee00906020146q149b5c8aq57759917784ff58@mail.gmail.com>

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On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Dan Naumov wrote:
> USB root partition for booting off UFS is something I have
> considered. I have looked around and it seems that all the "install
> FreeBSD onto USB stick" guides seem to involve a lot of manual work
> from a fixit environment, does sysinstall not recognise USB drives as
> a valid disk device to parition/label/install FreeBSD on? If I do go
> with an USB boot/root, what things I should absolutely keep on it and
> which are "safe" to move to a ZFS pool? The idea is that in case my
> ZFS configuration goes bonkers for some reason, I still have a fully
> workable singleuser configuration to boot from for recovery.

It should see them as SCSI disks, note that if you plug them in after=20
the installer boots you will need to go into Options and tell it to=20
rescan the devices.

> I haven't really used USB flash for many years, but I remember when
> they first started appearing on the shelves, they got well known for
> their horrible reliability (stick would die within a year of use,
> etc). Have they improved to the point of being good enough to host a
> root partition on, without having to setup some crazy GEOM mirror
> setup using 2 of them?

I would expect one to last a long time if you only use it for /boot and=20
use ZFS for the rest (or even just moving /var onto ZFS would save=20
heaps of writes).

Also, you could setup 2 USB sticks (install on one then dd onto the=20
other) so you have a cold spare.

=2D-=20
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C

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