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

A collegue’s desktop computer has twice lost touch with its DVD drive. The drive is OK, it’s recognized by the BIOS, it even booted from a FreeBSD DVD when told to do so. Yet Windows 7 refused to display the drive. The Device Manager utility complained about a missing driver service and something about a […]

Read More → CD/DVD drives in Windows 7 and code 39 error

The switch to new hardware finally happened. This is the first server to run FreeBSD/amd64 under my supervision. ZFS is used for all storage on this server. I chose to install the newly released FreeBSD/amd64 9.0-RELEASE, before upgrading to FreeBSD/amd64 9.0-STABLE by source. It’s just a matter of preference, given my 13-14 years of experience […]

Read More → New server and first attempt at running FreeBSD/amd64 with ZFS for all storage

Sorry for the nearly two week absence. This web server’s 10 year old hard drive developed too many faults between December 9th and 10th, and the system became rather useless. The wonky hard drive was replaced with a brand new one this week. Nothing important got lost thanks to AMANDA and a fair number of […]

Read More → Up and running again late in December 2011

Gone are the old MFS root fs image and the sysinstall utility. To create a useable ZFS root fs from the 9.0-RELEASE DVD we must specify an alternate location for the temporary zpool.cache file and an alternate mountpoint for the ZFS root fs by using a command like: zpool create -o cachefile=/tmp/zpool.cache -m /tmp/zroot zroot […]

Read More → ZFS root fs on FreeBSD 9.0