Backing up a PC-BSD disk

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Re: Backing up a PC-BSD disk

On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 12:49:47PM +0300, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> I installed PC-BSD (FreeBSD option) on a disk on which I only created /
> (ufs+journal) and swap.
> >From the handbook (
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/gjournal-desktop/article.html), I am
> still unable to tell how much space the PC-BSD installer allocated for the
> journal provider, which according to my understanding, resides on the same
> partition as the data.
> 
> Is the journal size defaulting to 1GB as the handbook says, or does the
> installer use a different value?
> 
> 
> [wash <at> gw ~]$ df -h
> Filesystem          Size   Used     Avail    Capacity Mounted on
> /dev/label/rootfs0  273G    9.8G   242G   4%         /
> devfs                   1.0K     1.0K       0B   100%     /dev
> devfs                   1.0K     1.0K       0B   100%     /var/named/dev
> 
> I am so much used UFS2 type filesystem where I create / and swap and I'd
> always get an identical size disk for backup. The backup would take the
> form:
> 
> dump -L0af - / | (cd /disk2; restore -rf -) # And this is disk duplication
> to me, so I can use disk2 as primary disk should disk one fail.
> 
> When it comes to ufs+journal, I am a bit lost on how to do things right when
> I need to make a second disk (disk2) to have same partition layout as disk
> 1.
> 
> Suppose both disks are 320GB, can I use dd to create the duplicate
> structure, with journaling enabled??
> dd if=/dev/adX of=/dev/adY bs=1m
> 
> But if you tell me that the PC-BSD installer allocated 1GB for the journal,
> then I can follow the handbook instructions to partition my disk
> accordingly. However, given that the installer mounted /dev/label/rootfs0 on
> /, I am not sure what will be the name of my filesystem on disk2 when I
> create it from the CLI. I'd love to partition as follows:
> 
> gw# bsdlabel -A /dev/ad4
> bsdlabel: /dev/ad4: no valid label found
> 
> Since I am unable to read the disk label of the first disk, I am not certain
> how to go about creating a similar label on disk2. I thought I could read
> out the disk label on disk1 and just write that to disk 2.
> 
> 
> Secondly, I am not sure how I can backup the first disk onto disk2 using
> dump once I have done the labels.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
> Nairobi,KE
> +254733744121/+254722743223
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
> Damn!!

> _______________________________________________
> Testing mailing list
> Testing@...
> http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo/testing

Personally when I do a backup / clone to another drive, I prefer to just use "tar" to backup
all the files individually, and then re-create the partitions on the new disk fresh, since geom may
be different between them, etc. 

So, heres how I would do it:

# cd /
# tar cvjf /usr/myback.tbz --exclude ./usr/myback.tbz --exclude ./dev .

Then format / mount the new disk somewhere, like /mnt, and extra the archive:

# cd /mnt
# tar xvpf /usr/myback.tbz

Then if you partitioned correctly, you should be able to boot right off the new disk :)

--

-- 
Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software

Re: Backing up a PC-BSD disk

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Re: Backing up a PC-BSD disk

On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 05:39:33PM +0300, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Kris Moore <kris@...> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 12:49:47PM +0300, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> > > I installed PC-BSD (FreeBSD option) on a disk on which I only created /
> > > (ufs+journal) and swap.
> > > >From the handbook (
> > > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/gjournal-desktop/article.html), I
> > am
> > > still unable to tell how much space the PC-BSD installer allocated for
> > the
> > > journal provider, which according to my understanding, resides on the
> > same
> > > partition as the data.
> > >
> > > Is the journal size defaulting to 1GB as the handbook says, or does the
> > > installer use a different value?
> > >
> > >
> > > [wash <at> gw ~]$ df -h
> > > Filesystem          Size   Used     Avail    Capacity Mounted on
> > > /dev/label/rootfs0  273G    9.8G   242G   4%         /
> > > devfs                   1.0K     1.0K       0B   100%     /dev
> > > devfs                   1.0K     1.0K       0B   100%     /var/named/dev
> > >
> > > I am so much used UFS2 type filesystem where I create / and swap and I'd
> > > always get an identical size disk for backup. The backup would take the
> > > form:
> > >
> > > dump -L0af - / | (cd /disk2; restore -rf -) # And this is disk
> > duplication
> > > to me, so I can use disk2 as primary disk should disk one fail.
> > >
> > > When it comes to ufs+journal, I am a bit lost on how to do things right
> > when
> > > I need to make a second disk (disk2) to have same partition layout as
> > disk
> > > 1.
> > >
> > > Suppose both disks are 320GB, can I use dd to create the duplicate
> > > structure, with journaling enabled??
> > > dd if=/dev/adX of=/dev/adY bs=1m
> > >
> > > But if you tell me that the PC-BSD installer allocated 1GB for the
> > journal,
> > > then I can follow the handbook instructions to partition my disk
> > > accordingly. However, given that the installer mounted /dev/label/rootfs0
> > on
> > > /, I am not sure what will be the name of my filesystem on disk2 when I
> > > create it from the CLI. I'd love to partition as follows:
> > >
> > > gw# bsdlabel -A /dev/ad4
> > > bsdlabel: /dev/ad4: no valid label found
> > >
> > > Since I am unable to read the disk label of the first disk, I am not
> > certain
> > > how to go about creating a similar label on disk2. I thought I could read
> > > out the disk label on disk1 and just write that to disk 2.
> > >
> > >
> > > Secondly, I am not sure how I can backup the first disk onto disk2 using
> > > dump once I have done the labels.
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Best regards,
> > > Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
> > > Nairobi,KE
> > > +254733744121/+254722743223
> > > _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
> > > Damn!!
> >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Testing mailing list
> > > Testing@...
> > > http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo/testing
> >
> > Personally when I do a backup / clone to another drive, I prefer to just
> > use "tar" to backup
> > all the files individually, and then re-create the partitions on the new
> > disk fresh, since geom may
> > be different between them, etc.
> >
> > So, heres how I would do it:
> >
> > # cd /
> > # tar cvjf /usr/myback.tbz --exclude ./usr/myback.tbz --exclude ./dev .
> >
> > Then format / mount the new disk somewhere, like /mnt, and extra the
> > archive:
> >
> > # cd /mnt
> > # tar xvpf /usr/myback.tbz
> >
> > Then if you partitioned correctly, you should be able to boot right off the
> > new disk :)
> >
> 
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> What is the disadvantage of using dump|restore after partitioning correctly?

None that I'm aware of, I'm not a big user of 'dump/restore', I'm a 'tar' guy myself,
so I was just chiming in with an alternative way to do the same thing :)

> 
> Anyway, you did not answer my question, or I haven't understood your point.
> I understand the disk geometry may differ, but I only use dump after
> partitioning, in which case I believe only files are written over, and
> nothing to do with geom, right?

I believe that is the case, I was thinking of what you said about using "dd" though, which
will try to grab everything, including partitioning. 

> 
> How can I duplicate my disk1 - the one I presented - and still ensure the
> result I get has journaling enabled?
> I am looking at a situation where, if disk one failed, I could simply
> disconnect it, connect disk 2 into the same channel and boom!
> 

Gotcha. It sounds like you want to use "gmirror" though, to keep a consistent copy of
whats on disk 1, on disk 2, and do a failover, right? Otherwise you'll be stuck having to 
keep manually syncing data from disk1 -> disk2?

However if you want to go the manual route, then you should be able to do this with either tar/dump
no problem. You'll just need to re-create disk2 with the same partition layout or similar to disk1,
make sure you setup your single "/" partition with gjournal and you'll be in business. 

The only weirdness I forsee is that we use "glabel" to setup /dev/label/rootfs0 as a link to 
/dev/ada0s1a.journal or whatever the particular devicename is you are using. If a failure occurs
and you need to swap disks, you may need to manually label the new partition when you try to boot
from it, otherwise you may get mount failures when it hits /etc/fstab :)

--

-- 
Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software

Re: Backing up a PC-BSD disk

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Re: Backing up a PC-BSD disk

On Monday, November 01, 2010 05:00:30 pm Kris Moore wrote:
> > What is the disadvantage of using dump|restore after partitioning
> > correctly?
> 
> None that I'm aware of, I'm not a big user of 'dump/restore', I'm a 'tar'
> guy myself, so I was just chiming in with an alternative way to do the
> same thing :)

I don't think you can use 'dump/restore' on a ZFS partition, but 'tar' still 
works.

Johann

Re: Backing up a PC-BSD disk

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9 Current Snapshot Available

I'm pleased to make available our first 9-Current alpha snapshot for you
to begin playing with. This testing snapshot contains MANY new features 
and improvements that we plan on including in the eventual release
of 9.0. However, by no means is this snapshot "feature complete" or
to be considered stable. Expect to find bugs and things to change 
over the coming months as we refine features. Consider yourself warned!

With that being said, here's a short list of some of the major changes
from the 8.x series:

 * Ability to select system "meta-pkgs" at install / post-install time

This is a huge departure from previous PC-BSD releases. Now you will be
able to customize your installed desktop easily, with various window managers
such as KDE4, Gnome2, XFCE4, and LXDE. After installation, you can
easily add / remove components of these meta-pkgs via the System Manager.

 * New PC-BSD Control Panel

Due to the new multiple desktop environment support, we have
consolidated PC-BSD specific tools and utlities into a central location which
can provide a consistent experience across window managers. When you first
boot up, you will notice a new "Control Panel" icon on your desktop, which
is your gateway to utilities such as Software Management, Network Config,
Firewall settings and more. 

 * PBI format has been completely overhauled and reimplemented as CLI

Our servers are busy cranking out new 9 PBIs for testing, so you will not
be able to download them via the Software Manager at the moment. However,
you can download 9.0 PBIs which have successfully built directly from the build
servers at the URLs listed below:

64 bit: http://pbibuild64.pcbsd.org/index.php?ver=9
32 bit: http://pbibuild.pcbsd.org/index.php?ver=9

Installing a 9.x PBI is easy: simply double-click the .pbi file from your
particular file-manager, or if that fails, use the "runpbi <pbifile>" command
as your regular user account. If you wish to delve deeper, take a look at the /usr/local/sbin/pbi_*
scripts. All the new pbi_* commands have associated man-pages, which should get you started exploring
the new features. 

Some of the new PBI9 features are digital signing, the ability to share identical 
libraries between applications, binary patch files, and more.

 * Code tree cleanup 

Along with the new features mentioned, our code tree has been cleaned up,
making it much easier to rebuild for testing and development. If you've
installed the base-devel and kde-sdk meta-pkgs, you'll have all the tools
necessary to checkout the source, and do a rebuild of our PC-BSD specific tools
using the instructions below:

# svn co svn://svn.pcbsd.org/pcbsd/current pcbsd-current
# cd pcbsd-current

Rebuilding the QT4 based gui tools can be done with this command:
# cd src-qt4 ; qmake-qt4 *.pro ; make install

Rebuilding the shell-based toolchain can be done with this command:
# cd src-sh ; make install

Known Issues
------------------------------------------

There are a couple of known issues with this snapshot. First, the networking
utilities may not save your configuration to /etc/rc.conf properly. Checking
out the source as described above and rebuilding the src-qt4 tools should
fix this issue. 

Also, the nvidia drivers included in this snapshot are currently from the 8.x series
and will probably not function. We will be updating them in a future
snapshot; in the meantime, please use the "nv" or "vesa' drivers. 

Reporting and Fixing Bugs
------------------------------------------

This snapshot is based upon FreeBSD 9-Current, and testers who find
bugs in the base-system can help the FreeBSD team by reporting
the issues using FreeBSD's Gnats PR system:

http://www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html

Issues found with the meta-pkg configuration, or from tools within the
new PC-BSD control panel, may be reported via the testing mailing list
or the PC-BSD forums at the URLs below:

http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo/testing
http://forums.pcbsd.org

Of course, detailed error reports are appreciated, and any patches to correct
the target bug. 

Download the Snapshots
------------------------------------------

The snapshots are currently available for download from our FTP site:

ftp://ftp.pcbsd.org/pub/snapshots/

--
Kris Moore
PC-BSD / iXsystems

Message sent via Atmail Open - http://atmail.org/

9 alpha bootonly install failure

Hi,

I tried to install the 9 alpha snapshot today using the bootonly CD in
VirtualBox but it failed early on - the reason being that the snapshot
isn't present on the isc mirror.
However I also noticed a few issues:

- The "cleanup" phase doesn't zero the last sectors of the disk so
won't wipe the GPT entry.
- "mount: no : No such file or directory" in the logs.
- "/tmp: optimization changed from SPACE to TIME" - is /tmp big enough?
- "Recommended minimum kmem_size is 512MB; expect unstable behavior."
- does kmem_size need tuned?
- When selecting the netinstall mirror, the combobox goes off the
right side of the screen.
- The root password gets logged in plain text. Could the hash be logged instead?
- It might be nice to use the ATA_CAM option or the ahci driver by
default since it looks like it's the future.
- It might be a good idea to create partitions starting at a multiple
of 4KB to give good performance on WD Green disks.
Also, there shouldn't be a need to specify the size "-s 524286945"
because gpart will use the entire space by default.

I know there's probably nothing that can be done about it, but the
install freezes on VMWare Workstation - I guess the vmware video
driver is crashing.

# PC-SYSINSTALL LOG
Running: find-update-parts
mount: no : No such file or directory
Trying DHCP on em0  <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Legacy Network Connection 1.0.2>
Trying DHCP on em0  <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Legacy Network Connection 1.0.2>
kern.geom.debugflags: 0 -> 16
Deleting all gparts
Running: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 count=3000
3000+0 records in
3000+0 records out
1536000 bytes transferred in 1.478349 secs (1038997 bytes/sec)
Cleaning up ad0
Running: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 count=2048
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.966937 secs (1084430 bytes/sec)
Running gpart on ad0
Running: gpart create -s mbr ad0
ad0 created
Running gpart add on ad0
Running: gpart add -b 63 -s 524286945 -t freebsd -i 1 ad0
ad0s1 added
Cleaning up ad0s1
Running: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s1 count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
524288 bytes transferred in 0.202234 secs (2592482 bytes/sec)
NEWFS: /dev/ad0s1a - ZFS
Running: zpool create -m none -f tank0 ad0s1a
Running: zfs set atime=off tank0
Setting up ZFS boot loader support
Running: zpool set bootfs=tank0 tank0
Running: zpool export tank0
Running: dd if=/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/ad0s1 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.000528 secs (969519 bytes/sec)
Running: dd if=/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/ad0s1a skip=1 seek=1024
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
32768 bytes transferred in 0.014961 secs (2190227 bytes/sec)
Running: zpool import tank0

Running: zfs set atime=off tank0
zfs create -p tank0/var
Running: zfs create -p tank0/var
Running: zfs set mountpoint=/mnt/var tank0/var
Running: zfs set atime=off tank0/var
zfs create -p tank0/usr
Running: zfs create -p tank0/usr
Running: zfs set mountpoint=/mnt/usr tank0/usr
Running: zfs set atime=off tank0/usr
swapon ad0s1b
Running: swapon /dev/ad0s1b
FETCH: /mnt/usr/.fetch-PCBSD.tbz
Error: Failed to download
ftp://mirrors.isc.org/pub/pcbsd/9-CURRENT-20101030/i386/PCBSD.tbz
Running: umount -f /mnt
Running: umount /cdmnt-install
umount: /cdmnt-install: statfs: No such file or directory
umount: /cdmnt-install: unknown file system
Trying DHCP on em0  <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Legacy Network Connection 1.0.2>

Other log lines include:
/tmp: optimization changed from SPACE to TIME

ZFS WARNING: Recommended minimum kmem_size is 512MB; expect unstable behavior.
             Consider tuning vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max
             in /boot/loader.conf.

--

-- 
Bruce Cran

9-Current alpha snapshot issue - not working under VirtualBox?

Dear PCBSD fellows -

I have just downloaded "PCBSD9-CURRENT-20101030-x86-DVD.iso" now and
tried to install it to my virtual machine directly from iso, then it
ended up with a screen with a PCBSD logo and then seems frozen (see
attached image). Not sure whether or not the virtualbox log would be
helpful but I have attached it along with the screenshot anyway.

# My machine:
Compaq Presario 2166ae (laptop)
CPU: AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+
RAM: 1024M
HD: 120G
VGA: ATI IGP
PCBSD: 8.1 32bit

# My virtual machine:
HD: 35GB
RAM:256MB

Perhaps I need to increase the size of my virtual RAM? Or is it
because *BSD under VirtualBox require VT-x or AMD-V hardware
virtualization support [http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes]?

Regards,
Sam

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