Freenas on

Death by PEBKAC evaded by amazing ZFS snapshot CTRL+Zery

Fri, 09 Mar 2018 19:23:27 +0000

Tonight I was doing a little development work towards a telemetry system I’m building for a thing. Along the way I managed (like a 10/10 n00b) to delete a bunch of vital configs on my reverse proxy server that handles all my traffic. Thanks to the amazing ZFS snapshot function made easily available by FreeNAS, I was able to recover from this otherwise devastating fckup, super fast and without service disruption.

LVM Recovery Bedtime Story: The tale of the journey home for some long lost bytes

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 23:11:58 +0000

Above: To the right is my hovel at the cottage I setup during my holiday-time-well-spent playing with ddrescue

I had an awesome LVM for nearly 15 years. It saw me through high school, 8 years of post-secondary nerding and then some years after. The drives involved came and went, as I perpetually upgraded it. I loved it dearly. At its peak, it was comprised of 7 drives. Inevitably, the Seagate-reaper came to visit and the LVM was no more. It might have persisted, but I was younger and crazier and I took the striped path to ruin.

FreeNAS 11 Add a drive to create a mirrored ZFS volume

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 22:47:06 +0000

Back in 2013 I cobbled together a little guide within a post on the FreeNAS users forum on how to add drive to an existing ZFS volume and convert it in to a mirrored volume. I can’t at all remember even writing this little thing, but recent discussion in the old forum over it brought in to doubt whether or not the method would still work. So I spooled-up a VM with the latest FreeNAS (FreeNAS 11) and tried it out. Yup. Still works, see: