FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)

Summary

I have an idea to set up a home NAS on FreeBSD. For this purpose, I bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720s SFF – it’s quiet, compact, and offers the possibility to install 2 SATA III SSDs plus a separate M.2 slot for an NVMe SSD. What is planned: on NVMe SSD: UFS and FreeBSD on SATA SSDs: ZFS with RAID1 While waiting for the drives to arrive, let’s test how it all works on a virtual machine. We will be installing FreeBSD 14.3, although version 15 is already out, but it has some interesting changes that I’ll play with separately. Of course, I could have gone with TrueNAS, which is based on FreeBSD – but I want “vanilla” FreeBSD to do everything manually. All posts in this blog series: (current) FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1) FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 2 – introduction to Packet Filter (PF) firewall FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 3 – WireGuard VPN, Linux peer, and routing FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 4 – Local DNS with Unbound FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 5 – ZFS pool, datasets, snapshots, and ZFS monitoring FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 6 – Samba server and client connections … to be continued Installing FreeBSD via SSH We will perform the installation over SSH using bsdinstall – boot the system in LiveCD mode, enable SSH, and then proceed with the installation from a workstation laptop. The virtual machine has three disks – mirroring the future ThinkCentre setup: Select Live System: Login as root: Bring up the network: # ifconfig em0 up # dhclient em0 Configuring SSH on FreeBSD LiveCD For SSH, we need to set a root password and make changes to /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but currently, this doesn’t work because the system is mounted as read-only: Check the current partitions: And apply a “dirty hack”: mount a new tmpfs file system in RAM at /mnt copy the contents of /etc from the LiveCD there mount tmpfs over /etc (overlaying the read-only directory from the ISO) copy the prepared files from /mnt back into the new /etc Execute: # mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt # cp -a /etc/* /mnt...