Hi there,

Taking over where i left before, so now i do have a fresh and shiny new machine, time to set it up.

As previously stated, the intended OS for this gig is FreeBSD, so there i am, discovering the Online Administration Console, trying to figure out what to do with this stuff.

Has it happens, there are a few installation procedures availables “out-of-the-box”, letting you setup your server within the web console, for a bunch of OS, including FreeBSD, but - yeah there is always a but - the FreeBSD 11 install procedure only support the UFS filesystem. I wanted to experiment all the fuss about ZFS so this wasn’t good enough for me !

The only way forward was to install the server using some kind of remote admin system, luckily the server is a dell-based one, including the entreprise version of dell’s handoff service: iDRAC, unluckily for me the iDRAC access wasn’t available initially … After a few search it appeared to me that i needed to install the server once using one of the automated and integrated procedure of the administrative console, to unlock the iDRAC access option.

So there we are, setting up a stub freebsd over UFS just for the sake of it, and waiting one hour for the installation procedure to finish.

Once this mandatory, but un-necessary step is done, the iDRAC console access is cleared and you are free to do whatever you want with your box. You only have to know the path to Online Virtual Media Database ! Here you’ll find all you need to ‘plug-in’ a whole lot of install media, including FreeBSD, and install you server the way you want it !

This is quite standard, a few text-based question later and i got a new OS, on a ZFS mirror setup !

Copyright (c) 1992-2016 The FreeBSD Project.
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FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p2 #0: Mon Oct 24 06:55:27 UTC 2016
    [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64                                                                                                                                                                     FreeBSD clang version 3.8.0 (tags/RELEASE_380/final 262564) (based on LLVM 3.8.0)                                                                                                                                                             VT(vga): resolution 640x480
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1231 v3 @ 3.40GHz (3392.22-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin="GenuineIntel"  Id=0x306c3  Family=0x6  Model=0x3c  Stepping=3
  Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
  Features2=0x7ffafbff<SSE3,PCLMULQDQ,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,SDBG,FMA,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,TSCDLT,AESNI,XSAVE,OSXSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND>
  AMD Features=0x2c100800<SYSCALL,NX,Page1GB,RDTSCP,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x21<LAHF,ABM>
  Structured Extended Features=0x2fbb<FSGSBASE,TSCADJ,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM,NFPUSG>
  XSAVE Features=0x1<XSAVEOPT>
  VT-x: PAT,HLT,MTF,PAUSE,EPT,UG,VPID
  TSC: P-state invariant, performance statistics
real memory  = 34359738368 (32768 MB)
avail memory = 33090113536 (31557 MB)
...

root@frb:~ # zfs list
NAME                    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
zroot                  2.37G   897G    96K  /zroot
zroot/ROOT             1.07G   897G    96K  none
zroot/ROOT/default     1.07G   897G  1.07G  /
...

Look like we are on track !