Tonight I made a simple, yet destructive (or at least partly) mistake: when I told FreeBSD which disk to destroy, I accidentally gave it the system disk of my little home server. This happened because it had the same size as the external SSD I had just plugged in, and I got confused.

I lost some reproducible configurations (the server’s name was in fact tempfbsd01), but I took the chance to run an experiment. My home server runs FreeBSD in read-only mode (that's the part I destroyed). From there, I manually enable the external drives (encrypted with GELI) and, in turn, the ZFS pools. Then I start the various jails and the (single, Proxmox Backup Server) VM.

Since I also have another test box running SmartOS, I decided to experiment: I connected the disks to it, created a FreeBSD bhyve VM on SmartOS, and passed the entire disks through to the VM. I reconfigured the FreeBSD VM with the bare minimum and booted it all up. The jails with BastilleBSD started without any issues - obviously the Proxmox Backup Server VM itself is still missing, but I’ll deal with that later.

I’m tempted to leave everything like this for a while.

And yes, for anyone wondering: I had fun 🙂

#FreeBSD #RunBSD #illumos #SmartOS #DisasterRecovery #IT #SysAdmin #Homelab