I had a great time at SELF in Charlotte, NC this weekend. One of the highlights, for me, was for the first time meeting some fellow BSD types in the flesh – Kris Moore (founder of the PC-BSD distribution) and Dru Lavigne (Director of the FreeBSD Foundation), no less. While discussing the pain of doing FreeBSD installs onto RAIDZ, Kris told me about the new graphical installer in PC-BSD that lets you create new RAIDZ arrays of all types and install directly to them, all without ever having to leave the installer, which I found pretty exciting. I found it even more exciting when he told me that the procedures taken by the installer were based partly on my own work at freebsdwiki.net!
I set up a new VM with three virtual disks pretty much the minute I got home, and started a new PC-BSD 9.0 install. Sure enough, although the option is a little hard to discover, I managed to figure it out without having to go in search of any documentation – and without ever leaving the installer, and with a bare minimum of blood and chicken feathers, I got a brand new RAIDZ1 across my three virtual disks set up, and PC-BSD cheerfully installed onto it. (This is testing only, of course – in production, you should only do RAIDZ onto bare metal, not onto an abstraction like linux logical volumes or raw files accessed through a hypervisor.) Pretty heady stuff!
To the right – Tux dropped by the table while Dru and Kris and I were chatting, and posed for me with BSD’s horns. How great is that?
