[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI rpool on USB flash in N40L?

[Reginald Beardsley]

Several people have suggested FreeBSD for the OS for my N40L based ZFS server and using the internal USB socket w/ a flash drive for the OS  However, after trying FreeBSD 9.0 installed to an HDD, I'm not enthused about having to relearn FreeBSD admin. And I'm not GUI admin inclined.  I'd prefer to stick w/ what I'm most familiar with.

However, the idea has considerable attraction.  Has anyone done such a thing w/ OI?  A bunch of stuff would need to move out of rpool so that it was almost R/O, but I don't see any major obstacles.  I assume the LiveCD uses a memory filesystem for these, so I'd expect it to be pretty straight forward.

This still leaves the single point of failure for the root pool, but copies=2+ might give enough warning to avoid a crisis.  Creating a replacement from a disk image using dd would be pretty painless.

Any reports of success or failure?  I've seen rather poor USB flash performance, but that might be hardware specific.

Have Fun!
Reg