[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hi - can anybody help me get OI installed the way I'd like?

[Bill Sommerfeld]

On 08/27/11 07:19, Mansion, James wrote:
> Well, I have a tiny NAS enclosure which holds 5 drives.  And I have an
> external eSATA3 port, and a suitable 60gig SSD.
>
> The box will hold 8gig RAM.  It's a home NAS and I can live with a small
> possibility of issues with losing some recent updates and downtimes if
> it goes bang.  I'd like to use RAIDZ for 6gig of store.  I know its not
> ideal given that some of the use is light db use
> (postgres+archiveopteryx) hence I'd like to help that out with L2ARC and
> ZIL.

I've set up systems like this (ssd sliced between root pool, and the 
zil/l2arc for a bigger data pool).

But what I did was:
   - install first to a conventional disk (whole-disk install)
   - then get the ssd, and partition it from the command line, and 
create the root pool on it
   - move the active root to the ssd using beadm -p, and mucking around 
with installgrub and bios boot order.

This indirect may not be necessary ... I didn't get the ssd until some 
months after I got the original system.

> Its for home NAS use and the biggest user of space is actually backups
> from PCs.
>
> Fdisk is very weird if you're a Solaris noob.  Will happily use it if
> necessary.  ZFS best practice seems a bit enterprisey sometimes - I
> can't really afford a drive as boot/root mirror for example, but my
> usecase isn't the main Solaris target.

What I'd recommend doing is to use fdisk to create a single whole-disk 
partition, and then use *format* to create multiple slices within that 
partition on the ssd

my convention was:

root pool on s0
zil on s3   (1GB is plenty for a home NAS..)
l2arc on s4

format
<select disk>
format> part
partition> print
partition> modify 0
partition> modify 3
partition> modify 4
....

reserve cylinder 0 for boot; cylinders 1..N for root, ...