I just attached a new volume to my vps and usually I follow the instructions provided using parted and mkfs.ext4 but I decided to try ZFS.

The guides I’ve found online are all very different and I’m not sure if I did everything correct to know the data will be safe.
What I mean is running lsblk -o name,size,fstype,type,mountpoint shows this

NAME     SIZE FSTYPE   TYPE MOUNTPOINT
vdb      100G          disk
└─vdb1   100G ext4     part /mnt/storage
vdc      100G          disk
├─vdc1   100G          part
└─vdc9     8M          part

You can see the type and mountpoint of the previous volume are listed, but the ZFS’ ones aren’t.

Still I can properly access the ZFS pool I created and I also already copied some test data.

root@vps:~/services# zpool list
NAME         SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
local-zfs   99.5G  6.88G  92.6G        -         -     0%     6%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
root@vps:~/services# zfs list
NAME         USED  AVAIL     REFER  MOUNTPOINT
local-zfs   6.88G  89.5G     6.88G  /mnt/zfs

The commands I ran were these ones

parted -s /dev/vdc mklabel gpt
parted -s /dev/vdc unit mib mkpart primary 0% 100%
zpool create -o ashift=12 -O canmount=on -O atime=off -O recordsize=8k -O compression=lz4 -O mountpoint=/mnt/zfs local-zfs /dev/vdc

Does this look good?
Should I do something else? (like writing something to fstab)

The list of properties is very long, is there any one you recommend I should look into for a simple server where currently non-critical data is stored?
(I already have a separate backup solution, maybe I’ll check to update it later)

  • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t set recordsize so small on a modern system, I left mine at 1M for a system that can store anything from small config files to full movies. Also set dedup=off (I can’t remember why now, but I believe it was bad to turn it on when your drive is nearly full?). Another option you might want to look at is xattr, I set this to ‘sa’ for all my systems because a lot of program use those features now. All of my pools are set up as raid-z2 or mirror, but zfs is an awesome filesys for protecting the integrity of your files.

    Otherwise it looks pretty good? Keep an eye on “zpool status” for any bad drives in your pool(s), and hopefully your system added a cron job to scrub your pools once a month.