BSD Cafe Billboard

Ah, okay. It's a known bug. I was doing everything right.

I don't have a way to recompile so I'll have to wait until 5.1-release. https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=291461

right, chewing through my own problem, found the good UEFI page on the Wiki. It doesn't cover using ZFS rather than UFS, but I'll start from that and if I can get each step right I'll document it. Back in a while.

Gentlefolk,

I brought myself back up to speed on FreeBSD by installing it on a T430 - ZFS and pkg install worked beautifully. Got Wayfire working, set up a jail to run a Luanti (Minetest) server. So far so good.

Now I'm working on the real challenge, bringing up a Poweredge R540 which will have raid-3 ZFS and many jails. And my first problem is right at the very beginning. I can install FreeBSD (15.0) from a USB stick just fine, but when I try to get the machine to boot...

(1) If I configure the 540 to boot from UEFI it cannot find the boot disk.
(2) If I configure the 540 to boot from BIOS, it finds the disk and boots just fine.

The Handbook is perhaps a bit out of date on this as it assumes BIOS, with a nod towards the possibility of UEFI. I'm guessing this problem has been solved many times over - could someone point me towards the solution?

Many thanks,

---WBTD.

@nuintari thank you for the reassurance and the advice on disk controllers. I was indeed about to wander off in the wrong direction.

@codeedog Hmmm. That's comparable to mine.

Shifting all the services across to BSD would mean offloading them onto some other machine in the interim, but there are laptops around. This particular Mini (6.2, i7 3615QM) came with 2 HDD anyway.

So this is very useful advice. I will ponder, and regardless of what happens, I will reincarnate this machine under BSD.

My primary reason for shifting hardware was to get away from the inflexible hardware configuration - I'm hoping to build a fast backbone in the house and put a 10G interface on the server. As for disks, I've got a big external JBOD with various bits of storage including software raid across 3 disks, and the hardware interface is a bottleneck. As I remember, the internal h/w interface for the Mac Mini SSDs was nonstandard and they were quite dear, which is why I went for an external enclosure even though it was slower. The R640 would let me put all the storage inside on a faster bus.

We run Nextcloud and samba, with a large library of images and ebooks and things (collections of digitised manuscripts, maps, etc - it's a lot of disk space!) and I'd like to be able to serve that faster to the desktop. We'd also be running Koha and backup services. As far as I understand, Nextcloud can be run under a BSD jail just fine, but Koha will require a Debian jail.

Thanks again!

Gentlefolk,

I am returning to BSD. It has been a wee while since I set up and administered BSD systems, but I did put in quite a few years before I gave up. I am definitely looking forward to getting off Linux. My first use case is to replace our server, a 15 year old Mac Mini that once ran OSX Server and then Debian.

Rather than make an ill-informed choice and then pester everyone with frustrating questions, I am hoping to solicit a bit of advice. I am hoping to get a used server and use jails to run various services.

Would a used Dell R640 with the H730p hardware raid card and a 2xSFP+ 10G card be an easy FreeBSD install? My sense from looking at posts elsewhere is that many people run FreeBSD on these, but I might be about to make a Well Known Mistake. It will be inside our router and firewall, so I'm not so worried about a hardened install.

Anything from raucous laughter followed by informative snorts through to gentle hints gratefully appreciated...

Many thanks!

---WBTD.