The Home Server Part 2: Ubuntu & ZFS | Bits, Bytes, Food and Fun

So I have my HP Micro Server. It has a modded BIOS. I have installed a spare SSD that I had into the OOD slot. Next step is Ubuntu.

Unfortunately I found the Ubuntu Server 13.10 doesn’t like to work with either of my USB keyboards which makes installing it impossible. So I got a Ubuntu 13.04 ISO and installed it via USB stick to the SSD, then upgraded to 13.10.

Now for ZFS I did the following

sudo -i

apt-get install python-software-properties software-properties-common

add-apt-repository ppa:zfs-native/stable

apt-get update

apt-get install ubuntu-zfs

apt-get install zfs-initramfs

I then put in my 3 500gb test HDD’s that I am going to use as practice for setting up and recovering zfs.

Next I edited /etc/default/zfs to enable automatic mounting/umounting of zfs shares on startup and shutdown, as well as the zfs sharing properties. (Change the top 4 options in the file from no to yes)

Execute the following to get the disk id’s of the disks you want to use in your zfs pool:

ls -l /dev/disk/by_id

Mine were:

ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-00TMA0_WD-WCAPW1902486
ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-00TMA0_WD-WCAPW1908191
ata-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_S0MUJ13P651726

Then to create my RAIDZ pool (the Zfs equivalent of raid5) with my 3x500GB disks:

zpool create -f storage raidz /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-00TMA0_WD-WCAPW1902486 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-00TMA0_WD-WCAPW1908191 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_S0MUJ13P651726

Then to check its all created

$> zpool list
NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
storage 1.36T 220K 1.36T 0% 1.00x ONLINE –

$> zpool status

Now when I ran both of those command the size it gives you is the raw size of the pool which in this case is 1.36TB.

Note also DEDUP is on. When I properly set this up with the final drives I plan to use I will be turning it off on some of my sub file systems.

If I run the following:

$> zfs list

NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
storage 137K 913G 38.6K /storage

I only see 913GB because of the 1/3 of the data taken to use as a parity.

Finally I am going to create a single zfs filesystem within my zfs filesystem

$> zfs create storage/test

$> zfs list

NAME           USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
storage        188K   913G 40.0K /storage
storage/test 38.6K   913G 38.6K /storage/test

Next. Creating some data, losing a drive, and rebuilding