Blame smartOS not reading my SATA controller.

Blame Linux for not having first class support for ZFS (where my data is held).

Blame @canadiancreed for giving me a way out of the quandry.

The backstory is that I moved all of my backups to two ZFS pools a few years ago. I was running ZFSonLinux and it generally worked…. except when I rebooted the server and had to force import the pools.

Fast forward to that server being replaced by a workstation (i7 Haswell, 240GB Sata3 SSD, and 24GB RAM). I tried smartOS by Joyent and ran into issues with my SATA controller not being recognized. It’s a shame given how awesome the smartOS vm administration is. I mean vmadm and imgadm are light years ahead of Docker.

Since smartOS refused to recognize 3 of my 8 drives I ran back to Linux. The good new, Linux recognized the sata controller. The bad news, Linux couldn’t import the pools. Frankly, Linux had a hell of a time with building the ZFS on Linux kernel modules. I managed to piece together a few clues from the ZFSonLinux Issues on Github. In fact, thanks to @dajhorn for supplying answers on that Github issue which allowed me to build the kernel modules.

This sounds promising doesn’t it? It’s not, it was a horrorshow. Linux refused to import the one of the two zpools. One of them imported nicely, the mission critical financial records. The other semi-critical zpool was shot and refused to import under Linux.

I spent a whole evening banging my head against this issue. If it hadn’t been for Chris Reed I wouldn’t have hit upon the solution.

His recommendation was to try FreeBSD… so I did. And it recognized the SATA controller and also imported the zpools cleanly! So after a dry run w/ FreeBSD, I installed PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant based on FreeBSD. Think of it as the Ubuntu of the BSD world. And hell yeah, it’s all working :).

So far, I’m really liking it. Replace ‘aptitude’ with ‘pkg’ and it’s pretty similar. Except, PC-BSD is working where Linux & ZFS were a hassle.