Pfsense 2.4 ZFS File System
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I'm wondering if ZFS on a flash drive will produce similar results that it did when FreeNAS switched to 9.3 and ZFS for the boot drive. Scrubs will show any errors and it uncovered just how inherently unreliable USB flash drives really are.
I would think a sensible move would be to invest in a cheap SSD for a boot drive if you want to run ZFS and 2.4 and have a reliable system. But it's just a guess at this point.
I am using FreeNAS for about 3 years now and remember the switch to ZFS. I am using a moderate priced 32 GB mSATA for the root file system. I perform regular scrubbing both on the ZFS root file system and on my RAID1 based zpool for my data. Srub did not detect any errors on any of my zpools so far.
My pfSense installation is currently hosted on the same mSATA and I will try ZFS as soon as 2.4 is released.
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Except for write-amplification cases, even TLC SSDs are so durable to writes, that they're about the same as a mechanical HD. The only difference is the SSD is about 10x faster and allows you to kill it 10x faster. Even companies like Google have started to go SLC because the number of writes is the least cause of their failures. They've gone so far and have said SLC drivers are worse for their work loads where data is rarely changed once written, that the density gains from the TCL allows fewer drives, which reduced the number of failures per unit of storage.
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I just ordered five 8GB Sandisk Cruzer Blades for $30, I'm planning on installing the latest 2.4 Beta on four of them in raidz2 and using the fifth as a spare for when one fails. I'm doing this to get off of the 640GB HDD that came with my eBay system as it wastes power to use it (I utilize less than 4GB), and also I'm just curious as to how durable consumer USB drives will be on pfSense in zfs. I've read about a lot of FreeNAS users getting years out of single consumer grade usb drives, if that translates to pfSense, then raidz2 flash drives could be a great solution to low cost boxes you don't ever want to touch again.
On my system I use PfBlockerNG w/ DNSBL & Suricata, 4 OpenVPN clients and one server.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E80LONK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I'm interested in your recommendations to get the most out of this:
1. RAM Disk, recommend using one or not? There is no UPS on this system. I have 8GB RAM that I see cap out max in the 50-60% when doing stuff with Suricata, almost always around 30% though. If you do recommend using it, I was thinking 500MB for ea and backing up data every 6 hours?
2. What Swap size do you recommend? My current system has 16GB and is currently using a little under 500MB. Obviously not going to use 16GB, what would you go with here?
And finally I have a question about how the disks appear in pfSense, I've attached two screens from my VM running latest 2.4 Beta and installed on 4x4GB virtual drives.
Both df -H and the webconfigurator show 4 different fields for my zpool./ using 7% of 6.6GB available
/temp >
/var > all using 0% of either 6.6GB in df -H or 6.1GB in the webconfigurator
/zroot >So 6.6GB available in the pool makes sense to me for 4x4GB in raidz2, but why the difference in 6.6 to 6.1 between df -H and webconfigurator?
6.1 in the webconfigurator makes more sense to me since / is already using about 500MB of 6.6GB?
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I went ahead and installed the latest 2.4.0 BETA today in a raidz2 with 4x8GB Sandisk Cruzer Blades.
I opted to use a RAM disk for 1.7GB /var and 750MB /tmp.
I didn't use any swap at all.
RRD backs up @
6 hours24, logs at1224 and DHCP24never.Currently everything is working very well, pfBNG, Suricata, OpenVPN.
On the status monitor RAM appears to be holding steady at about 35% (2.8GB).
/var is at 31% right now
/tmp 0%zpool is at 5% (650MB) used.
The fifth drive is added as a hot spare with autoreplace=on
Power usage is down ~7W (replaced a HDD).
zpool status pfsense pool: pfsense state: ONLINE scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0h0m with 0 errors on Tue Feb 21 01:11:15 2017 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM pfsense ONLINE 0 0 0 raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 da2p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 da3p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 da0p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 da1p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 spares da4 AVAILzpool get all pfsense NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE pfsense size 28.8G - pfsense capacity 5% - pfsense altroot - default pfsense health ONLINE - pfsense guid 9366339498345966656 default pfsense version - default pfsense bootfs pfsense/ROOT/default local pfsense delegation on default pfsense autoreplace on local pfsense cachefile - default pfsense failmode wait default pfsense listsnapshots off default pfsense autoexpand off default pfsense dedupditto 0 default pfsense dedupratio 1.00x - pfsense free 27.2G - pfsense allocated 1.53G - pfsense readonly off - pfsense comment - default pfsense expandsize - - pfsense freeing 0 default pfsense fragmentation 4% - pfsense leaked 0 default pfsense feature@async_destroy enabled local pfsense feature@empty_bpobj active local pfsense feature@lz4_compress active local pfsense feature@multi_vdev_crash_dump enabled local pfsense feature@spacemap_histogram active local pfsense feature@enabled_txg active local pfsense feature@hole_birth active local pfsense feature@extensible_dataset enabled local pfsense feature@embedded_data active local pfsense feature@bookmarks enabled local pfsense feature@filesystem_limits enabled local pfsense feature@large_blocks enabled local pfsense feature@sha512 enabled local pfsense feature@skein enabled localI'd still be very interested in hearing your educated opinions on these settings. /tmp seems to be way too big, /var is also too big if it isn't going to grow, but I don't know?
I sized /tmp and /var by running du -hs on both /var and /tmp on my old install right before I reinstalled, they were at about 1.6GB & 600MB respectively, so I aimed a little higher to be safe.Using swap on a system with too much RAM installed and using thumbdrives as storage didn't seem like a good idea to me, my normal install had hardly anything in the swap, but I don't know how often it's written to?
All is well as of latest update to this post. Monthly scrubs +occasional scrub after power outage.
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I have a SG-2440 w/128GB msata SSD and have been trying to install 2.4 with ZFS File System. I selected Auto ZFS with non-redundant strip. If will not proceed saying not enough drives selected. How would I get ZFS to installed?
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After you selected stripe it should take you to a screen listing your disks, you have to select your disk (press spacebar when your disk is highlighted) an asterisk will appear between the brackets "[ * ]" for your disk, then press Enter on OK to proceed, if you just press enter without selecting a disk, then you are trying to install onto 0 disks when there is a 1 disk minimum :).
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Thanks I figured it would be something simple.
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I'm trying to figure out how to successfully resilver my pool and reboot after losing a disk in the boot array.
I'm testing it out in a VM, I shutdown the VM, remove a drive from the VM, reboot, resilver. Resilvering always completes successfully.
I set it up as follows:# gpart create -s gpt adaX # gpart add -a 4k -s 512k -t freebsd-boot -l gptbootX adaX # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l zfsX adaX # gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 adaXWhen I go to reboot I get these errors:
ZFS: can only boot from disk, mirror, raidz1, raidz2 and raidz3 vdevs ZFS: can only boot from disk, mirror, raidz1, raidz2 and raidz3 vdevs ZFS: can only boot from disk, mirror, raidz1, raidz2 and raidz3 vdevs ZFS: can only boot from disk, mirror, raidz1, raidz2 and raidz3 vdevs ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable ZFS: can't read MOS of pool pfsense gptzfsboot: failed to mount default pool pfsenseWhen I run gpart show I see two partitions on each drive, under each partition is a second line that says - free - (xxxK).
On the spare drive that I'm using to resilver onto there is no line including - free - (xxxK), I've attached a screenshot for clarification.So my question is, what am I doing wrong and how can I get ZFS on Root to boot after resilvering?
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On the third line you're adding the freebsd-zfs partition without any alignment requirement, gpart will happily slap it right after the freebsd-boot partition and that's where the difference comes from. You can use gpart add -b 2048 -t freebsd-zfs -l zfsX adaX instead to make it identical to the other disks.
I don't think that is reason for the boot failure though. Try rewriting all the other bootblocks with 'gpart bootcode' too see if that makes any difference.
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When using a single drive how do you tell ZFS to keep 2 copies?
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When using a single drive how do you tell ZFS to keep 2 copies?
You have to do this right after the pool creation before any datasets are created or files are written on it:
zfs set copies=2 zpoolThis property is a dataset property but gets inherited by any child datasets so it applies to them as well.
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@kpa:
On the third line you're adding the freebsd-zfs partition without any alignment requirement, gpart will happily slap it right after the freebsd-boot partition and that's where the difference comes from. You can use gpart add -b 2048 -t freebsd-zfs -l zfsX adaX instead to make it identical to the other disks.
I don't think that is reason for the boot failure though. Try rewriting all the other bootblocks with 'gpart bootcode' too see if that makes any difference.
Thank you, I added the offset to p2 and that matches it up for the first part of the drive. But on the second part of the drive it still has no - free - section, both before and after the resilver. Obviously this stuff is all new to me, but it seems to me like this should match the others after the resilver? Or do I need to simply tell gpart where to stop p2 when creating it in order for them to match? I've attached another screenshot.
zpool status shows a successful resilver every time.
I also tried writing the bootcode to all drives but I'm still getting the same error.
Any more ideas as to why it's failing to boot after resilver?
Once I can get this all figured out I'm planning on writing up a quick howto thread to run through installing pfsense to ZFS on 2.4, and setting up hot spares, zfsd, autoreplace, and resilvering so that anyone can set it up and use it easily and effectively. Everything is going great until I resilver a boot drive and reboot.
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Resilver is not going to alter the partition table, it's a ZFS internal function that only syncs the pool contents between the redundant components of the pool. The components are in this case partitions.
There is still a glaring difference in the sizes of the freebsd-zfs partitions, on ada0 trough ada2 it's 8384512 sectors but on ada3 it's somehow 8386520 sectors. This would have done the job if you had used it instead of what I gave you earlier:
gpart add -b 2048 -s 8384512 -t freebsd-zfs ada3Neither number is a full 4GBs though and that probably explains the discrepancy, the first three disks were partitioned by the pfSense installer if I guess right?
Still no idea about the boot error though.
Edit: I totally missed that you have a spare on the pool, da4 (based on your earlier posting on the thread). Maybe you need to remove it because the ZFS bootcode might be probing it as well on boot and doesn't like it for some reason.
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Thanks for the info, I'll partition it that way.
The pool was automatically partitioned with pfsense installer.
The spare is what is being resilvered. So when I am rebooting the spare is in use in the pool.What I am trying to accomplish is to assign a hot spare, turning autoreplace=on for the pool, set zfsd to start on boot, and install the boot code to p1 of the hot spare so that (in theory?) If the system loses a disk, it will automatically resilver to p2 of the hot spare and reboot properly without any further intervention.
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I wouldn't use spares on a boot pool, it's not worth the effort and you might run into complications just like this one because at the boot time the ZFS boot code wants to probe every device in the pool. If you still want to use spares on a boot pool the spare must be partitioned properly beforehand for the use and it has to have the ZFS boot blocks just like the other disks in case it is selected as the boot device.
Hot spares is basically a feature for very large data pools with serious availability concerns when a disk breaks and has to be replaced. A firewall/router is hardly such a use case.
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@kpa:
I wouldn't use spares on a boot pool, it's not worth the effort and you might run into complications just like this one because at the boot time the ZFS boot code wants to probe every device in the pool. If you still want to use spares on a boot pool the spare must be partitioned properly beforehand for the use and it has to have the ZFS boot blocks just like the other disks in case it is selected as the boot device.
Hot spares is basically a feature for very large data pools with serious availability concerns when a disk breaks and has to be replaced. A firewall/router is hardly such a use case.
I'm definitely not trying to use spares as a normal boot pool solution. I want the hot spare(s) to be properly configured to boot ahead of time so that if a boot drive fails and the hot spare is placed into the pool, the system will still be able to boot if it has to.
As I understood it these commands are partitioning the spare and installing the boot blocks to it?# gpart create -s gpt adaX # gpart add -a 4k -s 512k -t freebsd-boot -l gptbootX adaX # gpart add -b 2048 -s 8384512 -t freebsd-zfs -l zfsX adaX # gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 adaXObviously, as you pointed out it doesn't seem to be working. I'll try partitioning with a stop at the end of p2 as you suggested and see if that works.
I'm hoping (and assuming) that it is just something that I am messing up, not a feature that just doesn't exist/work.The use case in my mind is if you set up a system somewhere that you won't have frequent access to if you need to replace a bad disk. This way zfs just resilvers the bad disk and in the event that the system needs to reboot for whatever reason, it does and everything works just fine with a fresh disk in the pool until you can get around to replacing it.
About the only ways I could see this making sense is if you have the above restraints on accessing the system AND
1. Need an exceptionally reliable firewall
2. Are on a tight budget and using cheap install media like thumb drives
3. Will literally never physically touch the hardware again and want a system that just works in a closet for a VERY long timeDefinitely fringe cases, and if it is something that just doesn't work (at all or well) with ZFS then it should be avoided, but if it's something that you can do with a few simple commands and it works then it would be useful. Primarily for tight budgets that want to install on thumb drives.
EDIT: Adjusting the partitions to exactly match the rest of the pool still doesn't boot.
Two more things I'm thinking:
1. possibly reinstall bootcode to all devices so that they match up with the new ada?
i.e., remove ada0, the hot spare which was ada4, is now ada3, ada1 = ada0, ada2=ada1, ada3=ada2.
So redo bootcode & labels (although I would think once bootcode is in p1 it doesn't matter what ada it is? and idk how much labels matter for booting?) so that EITHER:
The NEW ada3=ada3, ada0-ada0, ada1=ada1, ada2=ada2
OR
The new ada3=ada0, or whatever place it took in the pool2. gpart list shows "mode" or what appears to be permission, r0w0e0 for all p1's, p2's are different on the spare. Possibly changing this to match the rest, but I don't know why it would matter since it's booting from p1?
If anyone has thoughts on what I'm messing up to get this to work I'd appreciate them!
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Yes if the spare was ada3 or anything that is on the SATA bus but your spare shows up as 'da4' in your earlier post, you have to adjust your commands for da4. Also the spare can not be just 'da4', it has to be the freebsd-zfs partition on it which is 'da4p2' after partioning. If you read the Sun ZFS documentation you probably thought that the spare would be there as a whole disk and the system would automatically sync the partitions on it as well, this is not the case on FreeBSD.
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@kpa:
Yes if the spare was ada3 or anything that is on the SATA bus but your spare shows up as 'da4' in your earlier post, you have to adjust your commands for da4. Also the spare can not be just 'da4', it has to be the freebsd-zfs partition on it which is 'da4p2' after partioning. If you read the Sun ZFS documentation you probably thought that the spare would be there as a whole disk and the system would automatically sync the partitions on it as well, this is not the case on FreeBSD.
OK thanks I'll give that a shot, I really appreciate your help! I did read Suns documentation and eventually figured that out about the partitions (and some other differences), that's not the way it's setup anymore.
And ignore the earlier post, that's my actual pfsense install. I'm troubleshooting all of this on a VM before I do anything with my actual system. The real box doesn't use a hot spare like this.
On the VM all of the drives are adaX. -
@kpa:
When using a single drive how do you tell ZFS to keep 2 copies?
You have to do this right after the pool creation before any datasets are created or files are written on it:
zfs set copies=2 zpoolThis property is a dataset property but gets inherited by any child datasets so it applies to them as well.
Thanks for the answer.
Setting this at the command line - is it permanent or does in need to be put into a file?
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@kpa:
When using a single drive how do you tell ZFS to keep 2 copies?
You have to do this right after the pool creation before any datasets are created or files are written on it:
zfs set copies=2 zpoolThis property is a dataset property but gets inherited by any child datasets so it applies to them as well.
Thanks for the answer.
Setting this at the command line - is it permanent or does in need to be put into a file?
Zfs properties are stored in the pool metadata, they are permanent.