As I mentioned, I wanted to check out ZFS now that it’s finally available in the latest Solaris build. My plan was simple: to upgrade my Ferrari to Nevada B27 and then “blow away the Ubuntu partition and create a couple of 10GB partitions” to test ZFS. Well, it wasn’t quite that simple.
On Monday I borrowed a B27 DVD from a colleague and upgraded my Solaris partition. This went just fine, although I did run into a fiddly little xscreensaver bug that meant I had to snarf the B28a version of the Xorg bits. Never mind: I was now ready to repurpose that 20GB Ubuntu partition. But how? Solaris format/fdisk wouldn’t touch it. I booted up a Ubuntu LiveCD and used Linux fdisk: this let me change the type code to 0xbf, which is Solaris2, but Solaris still wouldn’t see it.
It turns out that Solaris only recognizes one primary Solaris partition on a drive; you can’t have more. So on Tuesday I rebooted the Ubuntu LiveCD and used fdisk to delete both the Solaris and Linux partitions (leaving WinXP untouched). I then created a new partition, and reinstalled Solaris from scratch; I sliced up the partition as 20GB root, 1GB swap, two 10GB slices for ZFS, and the rest in /export/home. Of course I now had to customize the system the way I like it, so I downloaded a ton of stuff, went home, and got things working during the commercial breaks while watching House.
Finally this morning I was ready to test ZFS:
zpool create -f test c1d0s5[the -f flag because the Solaris installation had put a UFS filesystem on the slice]zfs create test/tfscd /test/tfs
and start playing….
Verdict: if you want to experiment with ZFS, it’s a lot easier on a desktop machine where you can simply plug in another disk. You can use a laptop, but the chances that your disk layout will be appropriate are pretty slim; you should be prepared to repartition your disk and reinstall. Once you do, it all just works – kudos to Jeff and the team.
OK, next step is to try mirroring:
zpool create mtest mirror c1d0s5 c1d0s6zfs create mtest/tfscd /mtest/tfs