[OpenIndiana-discuss] Installing OI on USB stick

[Reginald Beardsley]

I'd ask why?  There's no requirement that there only be a single OI slice per disk. The installer and various other things push in that direction for some reason, but it's not a valid limitation that I can see.

Put rpool in a 2-way mirror using the s0 slices and then do whatever you want w/ the rest of the disks in the s1 slices.

I setup an N40L w/ a 4-way 30 GB rpool in s0 and a 3.5 TB RAIDZ2 pool in s1. It took some arguing w/ the installer, but there's a general outline on the wiki.  If I were doing it over, I'd probably make rpool a bit smaller.  I can take a 2 disk failure w/o losing data.

Leave a bit of unused space between the s0 & s1 slices so you don't need an identical disk to replace a failed drive and also some space at the end of s1 for the same reason.  At the moment the disk utilities have conflicting notions of geometry which could be a problem if you need to replace a disk w/ one that reports slightly different geometry.

This won't handle disks over 2 TB. Hopefully Oracle will release the GRUB2 changes needed for EFI boot soon.  However, I can't see any reason one couldn't dual label a disk, boot using the SMI label w/ an s0 slice at the beginning of the disk and then mount the rest of the disk using the EFI label.  It would require some code changes, but nothing complex.  It's a bit ugly is all and won't work w/ a real EFI boot BIOS.  But it would work w/ older BIOSes that don't implement the EFI boot spec.  So it might be worth doing any way.

Have Fun!
Reg


--- On Thu, 2/28/13, Peter Wood <peterwood.sd at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Peter Wood <peterwood.sd at gmail.com>
> Subject: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Installing OI on USB stick
> To: "OpenIndiana Discuss" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
> Date: Thursday, February 28, 2013, 7:40 PM
> I'm planning to install OI on an USB
> stick and then mirror rpool to another
> USB stick. This will free up the 2 HDD that were used for
> the OS to be used
> for storage.
> 
> The USB sticks will be plugged in to two USB ports and stay
> there forever.
> No unplugging or swapping ports.
> 
> The system will be a production system and it's important to
> be reliable.
> 
> Any reason not to install OI on USB sticks? Anything I
> should be careful
> about?
> 
> Your shared experience is appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- Peter
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