In what little free time I’ve had lately, I’ve been migrating my home fileserver over to Opensolaris. This is for two reasons. First, I’m quite impressed with ZFS. Knowing what I know now about disk failure, I want scrubbing (periodic verification that disk contents are really what you think they are.) Also, the zfs and zpool commands seem a lot more sane than the commands that manipulate the Linux software RAID (md) system. Second, I wanted to replace some of the hardware. The current set of drives is over 3.5 years old, and I could replace those 5 drives with a much simpler mirror of two 1TB drives and get the same capacity (which I still haven’t filled up.)
First I dealt with the issue of “It doesn’t even support my hardware!” Well, actually, it supported all my hardware except my VIA SATA controller card and the on-board SATA controller. After a lot of frustration, I found out from a friend that Opensolaris does support the incredibly-cheap cards based on the SiI3114 chipset, and many people have had good experiences with them. The only other thing that I needed support for in my server which wasn’t supported out-of-the-box was the Marvel Yukon PCI gigabit ethernet that was built-in to the motherboard. There is a driver available from skd.de.
So far so good. I ordered my 1TB drives, two 4 port SATA cards based on the SiI3114 (never hurts to have more SATA ports, and I think for the best reliability I want to split mirrors across the two SATA cards. I also decided that, since I wanted to put the root pool on a different disk from the data pool, instead of putting it on a cruddy old IDE disk I had around, I’d try installing the rpool on a mirror of 8GB CompactFlash cards. So, I ordered 2 CF to SATA adapters off Ebay from some guy in Hong Kong. But, I was feeling impatient, so when I ordered my CF cards elsewhere, I also ordered a dual CF to IDE adapter.
In my next post, I’ll detail all I went through getting Opensolaris installed and my new hardware set up.