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Boot environments are one of those magic features that when you've used it, it's hard to give up. My NAS has long been on OpenIndiana. Boot environments mean z
by seized 4y ago
Boot environments are one of those magic features that when you've used it, it's hard to give up.
My NAS has long been on OpenIndiana. Boot environments mean zero risk OS upgrades. At one point I could have gone back to a 4 year old OS version and booted it with no data loss.
You can create one at any time, so it brings an even better take on VM snapshots to the physical machine world. Hacking on something and want a fallback? "Beadm create beforehacking" and you're safe.
- willis936 4y agoI've never used a boot environment. Is there a way to use a boot environment to have a ZFS-backed Windows install?
- infogulch 4y agoYou may be interested in recent (~the last month) developments in adding Windows support to OpenZFS: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034
- seized 4y agoI don't see that ever adding boot environment support to Windows though, at least not in a way that's comparable to how it should work.
- infogulch 4y agoI agree that is unlikely, windows will still need to boot itself on NTFS. That said you could probably remap basically everything but what is absolutely necessary onto a zfs filesystem.
- seized 4y agoNot really, you can snapshot virtual disks to get kinda sorta close for VMs, but that's the whole disk and all data. Boot environments are closely linked to the filesystem layout where home folders are a separate ZFS dataset so that data isn't lost when booting to an old BE.
- fomine3 4y agoIt's not ZFS, but let's check this with btrfs https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble
- nortonham 4y agohow do you like using OI day to day on your NAS? Any pitfalls or things to be aware of?
- seized 4y agoNote that for me it's "only" a NAS, regardless of OS I don't run other services on it where possible. So it has just a few services running like Smartd, Monit, etc for health checks and alerts for failed fans, overheating drives, etc. All my compute is separate. It's sometimes a bit behind in software versions, eg the package manager version of Rust was a bit old, but Rustup worked. But there are crates that aren't compatible. Rust came up for me because I wanted to use Garage S3. Managing services is different. The systemd haters would probably have a fit with the XML file format and general usage, but it's not hard. But in all honesty I really like it as an OS. It's never limited me in any real way except for one Rust crate that was needed for Garage S3 that wouldn't compile. It needs zero maintenance. I update the OS (which takes one command) just to stay current. I think I had 450 days uptime on it once when I was busy travelling for work. Personally it's an under rated line of operating systems (OpenIndiana/Illumos/OmniOS). I use Napp-It as the ZFS management interface but that isn't a hard requirement, it's just very nice.