Author name: Dan Langille

I've been playing with computers since I read an Elementary Electronics magazine way back in the 1970s. I started contributing to open source projects in 1998. After that, I gradually moved from being a software developer to being a systems administrator.

The latest SATADOM drives contained data when I got them

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Today I wanted to test some stuff with the newly obtained SATADOM SSDs. I was surprised to find they still had data on them. dvl@r730-04:~ $ gpart show ada1 => 63 242255601 ada1 MBR (116G) 63 1985 – free – (993K) 2048 495616 1 linux-data [active] (242M) 497664 193816576 2 linux-data (92G) 194314240 47939584 3 linux-data (23G) 242253824 1840 – free – (920K) Well, one of them at least. Let’s have a snoop. […]

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Creating a new zpool for r730-01

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Finally, it’s time to put together a new zpool for r730-01 (the storage information at that URL is already out of date; once this new zpool is created, another post will replace it). In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 I just realized, that my previous post on the zpools for this host revealed there is already a zpool with 2x 4TB NVMe: data02: [20:17 r730-01 dvl ~] % zpool list data02 NAME SIZE ALLOC

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Another pair of SATADOM devices

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Now that r730-01 is booting from SATADOM devices (which are directly attached to the M/B, thereby freeing up drives bays / PCIe slots for larger devices), I thought it wise to buy a second pair. For two reasons: The price of used devices was pretty good It’s good to have spares nearby In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 smartmontools-7.5 smartctl info Here is the SMART info. Next drive: My notes The power on hours

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r730-01 zpools

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This post documents the drive locations for zpools within r730-01. It will be replaced from time to time with a new post. To the left of a device is an indication of the drive physical location. Unused devices Unused drives/slots: Slots 12 & 13 each contain a 4TB SSD. Slots 14 and 15 are empty. Those drive cages are on the workbench and each hold a 2TB SSD. There are also NVMe devices

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Consolidating the disk space in r730-01

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I’m writing this up to have a starting point for when I come back to arrange the free space into zpools. This post might be the end-result of a request for donations for disk space etc that went out on 2025-08-29 – I was running short of space. Since then, donations (both cash and hardware) have helped me figure out that problem. After moving the zroot zpool onto a pair of SATADOM SSDs,

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prod – moving to a SATADOM based zpool (zroot) using zfs snapshot and send | recv

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In this post, I’m moving my zroot zpool from larger devices to smaller devices. Why? Well, the smaller devices happen to attach directly to the main board of my server, albeit with some slight modification to a fan cowl. There have been several recent posts regarding this topic. I tried a different zpool approach, where I added new devices to the zpool and removed the old devices. That worked. It wasn’t ideal for

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Switching between BIOS and UEFI (and vice versa) on a Dell R730

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These are some notes I want to keep handy. They will help me switch back and forth between UEFI and BIOS booting. In this post: FreeBSD 14.1 Dell R730 To move from BIOS boot to UEFI boot System BIOS | Boot Settings: Boot Mode = UEFI System BIOS | System Settings | Device Settings | PERC: Select Boot Device = None Then you have to wait for it to boot, query devices, the

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Test run – moving to a SATADOM based zpool (zroot) using zfs snapshot and send | recv

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Yesterday I managed to move a zroot zpool from larger drives to smaller drives using snapshot, send, recv. Today, I’m doing the same thing. Yet, what is different? using serial numbers in some partition labels moving to SATADOM This really is a dry-run for when I do this on my production host, r730-01 – apart from the whole moving-to-smaller-drives part. host ssh keys NOTE: not shown in this post are messages like this:

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Test run – moving to a smaller zpool (zroot) using zfs snapshot and send | recv

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Today, I’m going to try a test run of moving a zroot into a smaller zpool. Over the past few posts, I’ve tested moving to smaller zpools using zfs remove. That’s not what I want to do with my zpool – mostly because it does not leave you with a functioning original zpool. I’m following https://www.hagen-bauer.de/2025/08/zfs-migration-to-smaller-disk.html and I particularly like their use of labels on each partition. In this post: FreeBSe 14.3 mfsbsd-14.2-RELEASE-amd64

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Doing stupid things with zpools

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Over the past week or so I’ve done some “stupid” things with zpools. I wanted a place to document some of the things I’ve read along the way: renaming a zpool: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/renaming-zfs-pool-via-zpool-import.65498/ getting the mrsas driver instead of the mfi driver – https://forum.netgate.com/topic/102137/dell-r330-perc-h330-sas (in short, at the loader prompt, issue `set hw.mfi.mrsas_enable=”1″` and then `boot`) I’ll add to this list as I find new stuff.

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