Daily Archives: March 18, 2020

FreeBSD Root-on-ZFS Migration

My home server (running this blog) got old, it has only 2G of RAM and a very old hard drive.

I usually like to use laptops as home server, they get the job done! I know I can’t have fancy things like RAID1, but I usually keep my backups on a separate disk/machine anyway.

So, I got my Dell Latitude E5470 next to my 11 years old Dell Inspiron to start the migration process.

Here’s a simple how-to guide for migrating a FreeBSD system from one machine to another.


Snapshotting The Pool

Okay, on the old host let snapshot the pool.

zfs snap -r zroot@migrate

Let’s save that snapshot in a file.

zfs send -R zroot@migrate | gzip > /usr/local/zroot.zfs.gz

This might take a while, grab some coffee 🙂

Now let’s save the ZFS Boot Environment (bootfs) property

# zpool get bootfs zroot
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
zroot bootfs zroot/ROOT/default local

Perfect! now let’s go to the new host! 🙂

Installing FreeBSD

Well, this is simple 🙂 first, install FreeBSD on the new machine. DON’T forget to use ZFS! 🙂

The reason why we are doing this so the FreeBSD installer will handle all the boot loader installation process. If you know how to do this manually, then be my guest (and blog about it).

“Reset” ZFS

Okay, now let’s “reset” that pool

zpool destroy zroot
zpool create -R /mnt zroot /dev/ada0p3 # please check the partition index thought
zpool export zroot # so we can import again with -N
zpool import -N -R /mnt zroot

Restore Old Snapshot

Here we go.

ssh antranigv@pingvinashen "gzcat /usr/local/zroot.zfs.gz" | zfs receive -v -u -F zroot

Aaand we wait again.

So, check you restored all the datasets with zfs list -r zroot

Set the bootfs property.

zpool set bootfs=zroot/ROOT/default zroot

Fingers Crossed and reboot

well, now it’s the time.

shutdown -r now

Done

Hope this helps 🙂

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