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9 posts
ZFS looks like it's eating every gigabyte of memory on the system. This is the Adaptive Replacement Cache working as designed — here's how to confirm that and tune it if it's genuinely a problem.
What a Solaris-assert-style ZFS panic actually means, why it almost always points to genuine pool corruption rather than a kernel bug, and how to safely get the system back up.
A complete walkthrough creating a boot environment before a risky change, and rolling back to it instantly from the boot loader if something goes wrong.
Building a real network-attached storage box on FreeBSD: pool layout decisions, dataset structure, and getting Samba to serve it with correct permissions to Windows and Mac clients.
ZFS arrived in FreeBSD's base system in the late 2000s, but installing directly onto a ZFS root without manual command-line setup took years longer to become a guided installer option.
zpool import shows your pool as UNAVAIL or fails outright. A step-by-step approach to recovering it without panicking or reaching for a backup first.
Set up hourly, daily, and weekly ZFS snapshots on a schedule, with automatic pruning, using FreeBSD's built-in periodic framework — no third-party tools required.
FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE, published April 13, 2021, made ZFS-on-root the bsdinstall default — a significant shift for how new FreeBSD systems get set up.
How ZFS's storage pools, datasets, and copy-on-write snapshots fit together on FreeBSD, with the commands you'll actually use day to day.