Thursday, 5 February 2015

Creating an Atom ZFS Box

So as you have probably worked out, I have a soft spot for ZFS. There is a lot of good things about it including the ability to grow.

I have a nice little NAS / Backup solution which uses an Atom quad core with 4 gig ram and 3 x 3TB disks.

Setup instructions:

OS Installation

Installation of the OS is simple. 

Ubuntu Server. Simple as that. 

Partitioning. 

/dev/sda
    1mb - BIOS reserve 
    1 gig - /boot 
    20 gig - / 

Leave the rest blank.

/dev/sdb
    6 gig swap 

/dev/sdc
    Nothing. 

Package Selection

  • Ubuntu Server 
  • Openssh Server

Post Installation

Once you have installed the OS you need to configure the rest of the disks. You may need to play with the numbers slightly here but the following should be able to be copied / pasted.


# Partitioning
parted /dev/sda mkpart none 21.0G 3001G

parted /dev/sdb mkpart none 21.0G 3001G

parted /dev/sdc mklabel gpt
parted /dev/sdc mkpart none 21.0G 3001G


#Install Software
apt-get install python-software-properties

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

apt-get update
apt-get install ubuntu-zfs

# Setup the Raid.
rm -rf /home
zpool create tank -m /home raidz /dev/sda4 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc1

#Create a vmware backup partition
zfs create tank/vmware-backup

zfs set compression=on tank/vmware-backup

## new setting thats being tested for a performance increase
## moves certain attributes like acls to inodes instead of a file in a hidden folder
zfs set xattr=sa tank