New Adventures in BSD Land
Recently, I started moving from BeyondTV to SageTV for my PVR needs. Maybe I’ll hash out all the reasons in a future post, but in the end it leaves me with my old BeyondTV “server” hardware free to move on to other purposes. As such, I’m building out FreeBSD on it for it’s next task. I decided to build out with gjournal from the start. I’ve build a few boxes with gjournal after the fact and I hated having the extra slices. Besides, I quickly run out of available slices. So this time I wanted to build it out from scratch with gjournal such that I could have the journal in the same filesystem AND I decided to go with GPT as it’s the next big thing. Well, to accomplish this I used Fix-it mode on the installer DVD and for the first time in a dozen years of FreeBSD usage, I installed without sysinstall. I’d never contemplated not using sysinstall, but having done some reading on ZFSroot installations people were doing I used some similar procedures. I must admit, I was surprised how simple it was and there’s a good bet this is going to be the way I do installs from now on (until gjournal and/or ZFS are available in sysinstall). It worked beautifully and in a single attempt. Disks are just too big now for fsck. I lived through one 800GB UFS2 filesystem having to be fsck’d when someone decided to turn off a system on me and it’s just way too slow (and I was lucky to have enough RAM). I’ve got probably 9TB of hard drive space now (6TB in 1TB drives; 3 of them in 1 system) and there’s now way I could fsck many of them if something happened. Gjournal and/or ZFS are the answers in FreeBSD land. Manual install is the way to get them going from the beginning.
