Re: Booting off raidz *mostly* work

Ollivier Robert wrote:
According to Ollivier Robert:
By popular demand:
http://www.keltia.net/howtos/zfsboot

I've succeeded in booting off raidz!

There is a remaining issue with /boot/loader getting zfs errors at boot time
resulting in loader.conf not being read. After setting the various variables
manually (vm.kmem_size, vfs.root.mountfrom) and loading zfs, it works...

http://static.keltia.net/download/raidz-boot.png

I've updated the howto to reflect that.

Any help in tackling the last issue is welcome.


I don't have help for raid-z, but I can contribute some parts of my own procedure that have been helpful:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

- If you would prefer to SSH into the livefs shell (have network access but hate typing out the commands manually, or you have to put up with a painful console terminal such as serial, not to mention that ctrl-c makes the livefs shell abort and try to go back to sysinstall):

ifconfig foo0 inet 10.0.0.2/24
route add default 10.0.0.1
echo "nameserver 10.0.0.1" >> /etc/resolv.conf
echo "domain example.com" >> /etc/resolv.conf
mkdir /etc/ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa1 -b 1024 -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key -N ""
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key -N ""
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N ""
cp /dist/etc/ssh/sshd_config /tmp/
echo "PermitRootLogin yes" >> /tmp/sshd_config
env > /tmp/env
ln -s /mnt2/bin/csh /bin/csh
/mnt2/usr/sbin/sshd -Ddf /tmp/sshd_config

From the network:

ssh root@xxxxxxxx
sh
. /tmp/env
. /mnt2/.profile

(I used /tmp/env to get the PATH settings from the sysinstall shell propagated to the ssh shell, and I specifically used -Dd so you can only login once since root has no password!)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

- Thinking ahead to when I need to reinstall a system in the future (happens many times during testing), I need to remember to wipe out
existing gmirror or partitions/partition tables:

gmirror clear /dev/da0p2 /dev/da1p2
gpart delete -i 3, 2, 1, gpart destroy da0 etc

I strongly suggest putting swap on a gmirror if it isn't going to be protected by another form of raid, even though it contains no valuable data, I don't want my system to go down because of a failure on a non-redundant swap volume.

Something like:
gmirror label -v -b prefer swap /dev/da0p2 /dev/da1p2 && \
echo '/dev/mirror/swap none swap sw 0 0' >> /rpool/ROOT/freebsd/etc/fstab

It would also be handy to enable gmirror status checks in periodic.conf although I used a cronned script so I get paged more than once a day if there is a problem.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

- You could use jot to duplicate various gpart commands to multiple drives, examples:

Clear 2 drives with up to 3 partitions each:
jot -w "gpart delete -i 3 da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh
jot -w "gpart delete -i 2 da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh
jot -w "gpart delete -i 1 da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh
jot -w "gpart destroy da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh

Clear 8 drives with up to 3 partitions each:
jot -w "gpart delete -i 3 da" -s \; 8 0 7 | sh
jot -w "gpart delete -i 2 da" -s \; 8 0 7 | sh
jot -w "gpart delete -i 1 da" -s \; 8 0 7 | sh
jot -w "gpart destroy da" -s \; 8 0 7 | sh

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

- In 8.0-BETA2 or above, you can use some new features in gpart for gpt auto sizing to automatically calculate the starting sector or even let your last partition use all remaining space: (helpful so you don't need to do as much math and less typing)

Create gpt, set partition active, create 3 partitions on 2 drives using all remaining space after the boot and swap:
jot -w "gpart create -s GPT da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh
jot -w "echo 'a 1' | fdisk -f - -q /dev/da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh
jot -w "gpart add -s 128 -t freebsd-boot da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh
jot -w "gpart add -s 4194304 -t freebsd-swap da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh
jot -w "gpart add -t freebsd-zfs da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh

Similar for installing boot code for 2 drives:
jot -w "gpart bootcode -b /rpool/ROOT/freebsd/boot/pmbr -p \
/rpool/ROOT/freebsd/boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 da" -s \; 2 0 1 | sh

------------------------------------------------------------------------

- Instead of extracting dists from the install media, I chose to build tar files of a system image using procedures gleaned from the jail manpage (its pretty easy), that way I can add loader support and plenty of customizations to my image, use an up to date build, even include the source and ports trees for convenience into my tar, and the tar tends to extract in just a couple minutes on the destination system (70-180 seconds depending on the system and what is in the tar). This way I can also use the 8.0 livefs to install either 7.x or 8.x just based on which tar I download. Obviously this has more benefit if you have more than a small number of systems to install; if its just one or two then pre-customizing isn't worth it. I stopped including the portsnap files dir in favor of a post-install fresh 'portsnap fetch' though, because after just a couple weeks, it seemed like my 'portsnap fetch' and 'update' took longer than getting a fresh copy. Since I track -stable on my servers, its nice to keep my tar updated every month or few weeks and then my new installs don't each require a source update since they start life being fairly up to date already. Also a very nice result is by adding NO_FOO options to the image build, the resulting image never has parts of the base that you never wanted in the first place, for example if you leave out sendmail or lpr, so you don't have to worry about 'make check-old' being complete enough.

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