I upgraded some of my virtual machines during my summer holiday. They are all running ZFS, but were neglected for so long that they were still updating their source and ports trees using CVSup. I began pondering how to migrate to Subversion with the least fuzz possible. Luckily, I had anticipated the switch to Subversion, […]

Read More → Moving ZFS datasets around eases the transition from CVSup to Subversion

I’ve been experimenting with FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT and an alternative ZFS layout for more than a year. The idea is to have a simple way of switching between boot environments. Thus, you have the opportunity of reverting to a previous boot environment without resorting to snapshots and rollbacks as you would with a sole boot environment. […]

Read More → Alternative ZFS layout

Not long ago it was announced that the FreeBSD ports tree will cease exporting its Subversion repository to CVS, and subsequently any use of CVSup for updating the ports tree will be discontinued by February 28th 2013. FreeBSD’s main source tree repository has been served by Subversion since late May 2008 with every commit done […]

Read More → Making your own FreeBSD Subversion repository mirror

Someone found my old ZFS snapshot script rather useful and wanted to improve it. Unfortunately I used the GPLv2 license in the original script. To accommodate my friend, I have re-released the snapshot script under the 2-clause BSD license. Feel free to use whichever license, 2-clause BSD or GPLv2, that suits your needs.

Read More → Periodic ZFS snapshots – 2-clause BSD license

Someone named “Edward M” posted on the freebsd-questions mailing list a question of when should we create a ZFS filesystem. I didn’t reply to any of the messages, but I decided to write this post expressing my view. In short, whenever a part of the filesystem hierarchy exhibits different characteristics, create one or more ZFS […]

Read More → When to create a ZFS filesystem?

George Mamalakis was having trouble with ZFS not detecting and utilizing his resized GPT freebsd-zfs partitions. Marco van Tol came to the rescue with a corrective procedure. Credit goes to George Mamalakis for raising the issue and to Marco van Tol for the solution. I’m just a simple bystander in comparison to these two, fine […]

Read More → Resizing mirrored ZFS root pool