I've read that one of the last task of a blacksmith apprentice is to make all the tools a workaday blacksmith would need to use to blacksmith. IE your last les

I've read that one of the last task of a blacksmith apprentice is to make all the tools a workaday blacksmith would need to use to blacksmith. IE your last lesson is to make your own anvil, your own hammers, tongs, etc. At $DAYJOB I wrote a bunch of scripts to mechanize building ZFS arrays for whatever expected deployment I'd imagined on that day. Among the tasks was to make luks encrypted volumes on which to put the zvols, standardize the naming schemes, sane defaults like ashift=12, lz4 compression, etc. (this was well before encryption was part of ZFS; I haven't updated the scripts since to support encryption in zfs since it's not really been a problem this way) I don't remember many of these flags now, but have a script as reference for documentation, and others on the team don't need to know much about ZFS besides run make-zfs-big-mirror or make-big-zfs-undundant-raid0 and magic happens. Eventually maybe even that stuff will be automated away by our provisioning, if we ever are in a position to provision systems more than 20 times per year.