Jails dataset on freenas-boot

[kjp4756]

Today I've been experimenting with freenas 9.10 in vmware. I manually created a Jails dataset on freenas-boot. I configured the mountpoint for it to /mnt/Storage/Jails (Storage is my main pool). I then configured the jails tab to use /mnt/Storage/Jails as the jail root. This all works fine and dandy for me with my limited testing in vmware.

Is there any harm in doing this on a production system? For a while now I've wanted to get an SSD to use for boot and jails and I think I've finally figured out a way to do it.

 

[kjp4756]

Never mind. Didn't work. Things went to hell when I rebooted the VM. Guess I'll just deal with using crummy USB flash for the boot drive.

 

[pirateghost]

Never mind. Didn't work. Things went to hell when I rebooted the VM. Guess I'll just deal with using crummy USB flash for the boot drive.

what is stopping you from using the SSD for the jails and leaving FreeNAS on USB?

 

[kjp4756]

Getting a little tired of flash drives failing on me. Seems to happen a couple of times a year after I do an update. I reboot the server and the drive is dead. I've been using kingston flash drives so that may be why they suck. I also find the performance quite slow when deleting old freenas install snapshots. Last time I cleaned up 9 or 10 snapshots and it took a couple of hours.

 

[pirateghost]

Getting a little tired of flash drives failing on me. Seems to happen a couple of times a year after I do an update. I reboot the server and the drive is dead. I've been using kingston flash drives so that may be why they suck. I also find the performance quite slow when deleting old freenas install snapshots. Last time I cleaned up 9 or 10 snapshots and it took a couple of hours.

Yeah, spend a few bucks extra and get some decent USB sticks. Sandisk Cruzer Fits are pretty popular around here. Deleting snapshots should never take that long. I can have 30-40 of them deleted in less than a minute.

 

[kjp4756]

Well I did get jails living in harmony on the boot drive. Had to hack install.sh before installing freenas. Basically edited the create_partitions function to create a 4GB partition instead of using the full drive. After installation I added another freebsd-zfs partition, created a zpool, exported zpool, then imported new jails pool through gui.

Code:

[root@freenas] ~# gpart show da0

=>      34  41942973  da0  GPT  (20G)

        34      1024    1  bios-boot  (512K)

      1058         6       - free -  (3.0K)

      1064   8388608    2  freebsd-zfs  (4.0G)

  8389672  33553328    3  freebsd-zfs  (16G)

  41943000         7       - free -  (3.5K)

[root@freenas] ~# zfs list

NAME                                                     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

freenas-boot                                             478M  3.38G    31K  none

freenas-boot/ROOT                                        471M  3.38G    25K  none

freenas-boot/ROOT/Initial-Install                          1K  3.38G   468M  legacy

freenas-boot/ROOT/default                                471M  3.38G   469M  legacy

freenas-boot/grub                                       6.32M  3.38G  6.32M  legacy

jails                                                   1.65M  15.4G    19K  /mnt/jails

jails/.system                                           1.49M  15.4G    20K  legacy

jails/.system/configs-9774dd8b766e45929fb948e0f96adbf5    19K  15.4G    19K  legacy

jails/.system/cores                                       19K  15.4G    19K  legacy

jails/.system/rrd-9774dd8b766e45929fb948e0f96adbf5        19K  15.4G    19K  legacy

jails/.system/samba4                                    1.03M  15.4G  1.03M  legacy

jails/.system/syslog-9774dd8b766e45929fb948e0f96adbf5    400K  15.4G   400K  legacy

 

[pirateghost]

Now run an update and let's see what happens

 

[kjp4756]

Just installed updates; no problems.

 

[pirateghost]

Well. Good luck to you.

 

[hc42]

Hi,

I am struggling around with the same idea. I tried creating datasets on teh boot pool and then nullfs mount or symlinking the mount point to the jail path on an allowed dataset. That works but the gui does not recognize the jail state. Also since the boot pool is hidden configuring snapshots and replication is not possible. So I consider reinstalling using your trick. Any problems occurred or thoughts why this might be bad?

Thanks for the idea,
Best Hans-Christian