ZFS on a 2nd HD

champion

I'm relatively new to ZFS and decided to install zfs on a blank hard-drive, as a second drive to my GhostBSD system.

I made canmount=off so as not to conflict with the zroot pool, which also mounts at /.
zpool create -R / -O canmount=off zstorage ada0 zfs create zstorage/stg

I decided I didn't want to create a /zstorage/stg folder at root.
So I changed the mountpoint to 'legacy,' after the fact, so that I could mount it with fstab.
zfs set mountpoint=legacy zstorage/stg

FSTAB:

#SSD Disk zstorage/stg /stg zfs rw,late 0 0

I noticed that this doesn't work and drops me to single user mode.
Then, I removed it from fstab.

I have a startup script that runs as a MATE startup application.

#!/bin/sh #zpool storage drive doas zpool import zstorage & doas mount -t zfs zstorage/stg /stg &

This does import the zpool called 'zstorage', however the second 'doas' command does not mount the 'zstorage/stg' filesystem. It will mount if I open a terminal and type it in.

So my question is; "how can I get the mount command to work in the startup script?"

And; "Is there a better way to do this? If so, what do you suggest?"

The filesystem is new and has nothing on it yet.

champion

I fixed this by doing two things:

1: I changed the mountpoint from legacy to '/stg' so that 'zstorage/stg' mounts at the '/stg' directory and automatically mounts when the zpool 'zstorage' is imported.
zfs set mountpoint=/stg zstorage/stg

2: I changed the MATE startup script to only import the zpool called 'zstorage'.

#!/bin/sh
#zpool storage drive
doas zpool import zstorage &
#doas mount -t zfs zstorage/stg /stg &

There is nothing in FSTAB related to ZFS now.
However, I'm sure there is a better way to mount a second disk with it's own zpool at boot time.
I just don't know what it would be.
Probably an OpenRC script.

ericbsd

champion I am happy to see that you were able to fix the issue.

brianthehughes

champion
Thanks for this. I am planning on adding a second drive to a system and will follow your steps.

champion

I have my zfs drive mounting at boot without a MATE script now, I didn't like the idea of a 'doas' statement in a script.

These are the basic steps [we could combine or separate the setting of the property values into one or more steps]:

Create the zpool on the device, it needs a cachefile to mount at boot, the name must be 'zpool.cache'.
zpool create -R / -o cachefile=/boot/zfs/zpool.cache zstorage ada0
Create the zfs filesystem on the zpool.
zfs create zstorage/stg
Set the mountpoint for the filesystem, this step is optional depending on where you want it mounted [make sure the mountpoint directory exists].
zfs set mountpoint=/stg zstorage/stg
Set the user permissions for the filesystem (I only have one user on my system).
chmod 0777 /stg

bforest

ZFS Seems to work fine on a single drive but a single drive defeats one of the main purposes of ZFS, which is to protect your data! I highly recommend adding two drives and making a mirror at minimum.

If your boot drive is ZFS then you can create a mirror out of the second drive if it is equal or larger than your boot drive. This will protect your entire system in case of a drive failure.

Here is an original doc about ZFS and it's capabilities!!

-Ben

champion

bforest if it is equal or larger than your boot drive

My 2nd drive isn't larger than my boot drive, but it's true enough that I could have used UFS and be no better or worse off, although I wouldn't know how to create a ZFS 2nd drive that mounts at boot time.

Creating a raid array seems trivial enough, though, once we get this far.

ericbsd

Running ZFS is not a bad thing. I have been doing that for over 7 years.

ericbsd

@champion, my oldest installation dates from 2021-02-27 no data corruption.