AshleyMills.com

NOTE: this is unrelated to the i386 installation we were going through in another post. That series will continue on its own.

OK so I found out about Sun Microsystems Zeta File System (ZFS) a while ago, and after being blown away by its blisteringly fast perforance on Opensolaris, I knew I had to run an OS that used it.

Now, Opensolaris is pretty badass, don't get me wrong. But I don't know, the feel of the OS, I just prefer FreeBSD. Now FreeBSD being the great project it is, ported ZFS a while ago. Unfortunately the encumbered sysinstall hasn't been upgraded to support it.

I tried a few tutorials to setup ZFS manually, but they never worked, and although I read the manpages and tried to work it out I gave up due to time and couldn't be bothered restrictions.

Luckily I came across this script from some random elite: http://myconan.net/blog/archives/1794. Note that this guy describes his blog as "animeBSD. Your source for random craps everyday.", which made me laugh.

But anyway, the script actually works!

Well OK, I had to make one modification to the script. I had to set SRCLOADER=0 for it to work. I also changed a few things like instead of /usr/home I used /home, but otherwise just used the script directly. BTW make sure you use "sh zfsinstall.sh" an not "./zfsinstall.sh" because the latter did not work for me for some reason.

To actually run this, you just DL the FreeBSD usb image, copy it to a usb stick with "# dd if=8.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=10240 conv=sync", mount the USB, copy the edited script onto it, umount it. Reboot from the USB, go into fixit console from sysinstall, and then run the script, et voila!