zfs

Missing The (Mount) Point…

Posted on by dk

So my Silverstone DS-380 casing’s power LED seems to have bought it… In an attempt to try fix it (or at least test it), I had to get to the motherboard and that meant I had to remove all the drives, drive cage, etc… Since piecing everything back together again was a pain, I left the 3.5″ spinning media drives out to boot the system several times during testing.

After giving up on the power LED, I re-plugged in everything + the drives… Only to find that, of some 11 different ZFS sub pools, 10 were missing…

My heart stopped and the universe whirled around me…

zpool status showed the drives were all present and accounted for…

Thankfully, zfs list showed all my ZFS sub pools/”partitions” were still there… So, what gives?

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Sharing The Love…

Posted on by dk

So, the ZFS datasets have been created, and we now have to start creating the shares…

<rant>No thanks to Micro$oft, NFS support on is now only available on Enterprise versions of Windows 10, and therefore I will cannot use (the more efficient) NFS in my largely Windows environment network.</rant>

Goals

My goal was to:

  1. set up several different shares, mapping directly to the ZFS datasets
    1. this meant setting up SAMBA in a “WORKGROUP” environment
  2. allow different users to map this share on Windows, and be able to view only, or modify any objects within (add/delete/edit) according to their permissions per share

What follows is the steps required to:

  • create the SAMBA share(s) and securing it (or at least setting the correct permissions)
  • set-up the SAMBA user(s)

Note: There is a difference between Linux uid/user and gid/group and SAMBA SID/user and GID/group; within this context, I attempt to refer to the latter as “SMB User” and “SMB group” for disambiguation.

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RAIDZ2… Finally

Posted on by dk

Finally, we start installing the ZFS packages and start the RAIDZ2 set-up (no screenshot):

apt-get zfsutils-linux

For several reasons, I chose to use:

  • vdevs created “by-id”:
    • as per advice from multiple places online, using the “easier” /dev/sdx identifier may break things should the order be changed (e.g. you swapped cable ends or drive cages, etc.)
  • lz4 compression
    • as per statistics from some places, the “cost” of LZ4 is relatively low/negligible

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Reading Up On ZFS…

Posted on by dk

Attempting to implement ZFS and the decisions that go into it is enough to make any newbie give up (and/or get terribly confused)…

Unfortunately, Google does not help, what with old information (e.g. installation instructions: old vs. new; possibly outdated information) and different “package variations” of ZFS (e.g. Ubuntu-native ZFS packages vs. ZFS-native), and the endless arguments on the “correct number of disks” for RAIDZ/2 (mirrored vdevs only? RAIDZ? RAIDZ2? mirrored RAIDZ/2? block size?)…

I read through all those articles linked above, including some other helpful(?) ones:

Some other “associated” links/articles/comments/posts that I came across:

My decision?

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