[pfSense] KVM virtualization: Fatal trap 9: general protection fault while in kernel mode

2014-07-30 Thread Lorenzo Milesi
Hi.
I'm reposting here a question I asked on the forum, hoping for a different 
audience.

I'm running pfSense for some time now, since 2.0.something it has always been 
running without issues. With the latest 2.1 releases I'm very rarely running 
into crashes. Today I managet do catch one:

Fatal trap 9: general protection fault while in kernel mode
[...]
Stopped at rn_match+0x25: cmpw $0,0x10(%r13)

Here's a full screenshot of dump caught on console:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/706934/pfsense_crash.png

The VM is configured with VirtIO disks, emulated e1000 network cards.
Any hint on what it could be? Where to look at?
thanks
-- 
Lorenzo Milesi - lorenzo.mil...@yetopen.it

YetOpen S.r.l. - http://www.yetopen.it/

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Re: [pfSense] KVM virtualization: Fatal trap 9: general protection fault while in kernel mode

2014-07-30 Thread compdoc
 The VM is configured with VirtIO disks, emulated e1000 network cards.

I use kvm and have had no problems running any of the 2.1 releases. I'm
building a VM server right now that will run pfSense and one other guest OS.

I have used the virtio drivers for nics, storage, and memory ballooning, but
because of the steps you have to take to switch to virtio, I'm using e1000
and IDE emulation on this one to keep it simple. 

What host OS are you using, and what hardware is it running on? (real cpu,
ram, and storage)

Is it possible to see the results of virsh dumpxml for the guest?


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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Paul Mather
On Jul 30, 2014, at 5:37 AM, Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de wrote:

 Hi list,
 
 I'm seeing the following warning on my pfsense 2.1.4-RELEASE (i386):
 
 ZFS WARNING: Recommended minimim kmem_size is 512MB; expect unstable
 behavior.
 Consider tuning vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max in /boot/loader.conf
 
 Currently, the values are:
 vm.kmem_size=525544320
 vm.kmem_size_max=535544320
 
 Given this machine has 1 Gigabyte of RAM, which values should I enter?

Personally, I think ZFS on i386 has become a losing proposition as of 
late.  I ran a ZFS-on-root FreeBSD/i386 10-STABLE system with 2 GB of 
RAM and it appeared to become very flaky with ZFS in its latter months 
(I eventually switched it out for a FreeBSD/amd64 system).

I had to be careful with what values for vm.kmem_size, 
vm.kmem_size_max, and vfs.zfs.arc_max I put in /boot/loader.conf 
because often certain combinations would panic the system on boot.  
Also, to use quite a bit of the available RAM for ARC required me to 
build a custom kernel with KVA_PAGES=512 set in the kernel config file.

I believe the days when FreeBSD/i386 was considered the primary, 
tried-and-tested distribution and FreeBSD/amd64 the less-tested version 
are long behind us.  If you can run FreeBSD/amd64 then you should.  If 
you can only run FreeBSD/i386 then I wouldn't recommend using ZFS with 
it.  I just don't think it gets adequate testing any more.  (YMMV.)

Cheers,

Paul.

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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Adam Thompson
Faster caching when using squid and/or some of the other packages?

But, yes, it would be a bit silly, regardless.

-Adam

On July 30, 2014 9:43:01 AM CDT, Vick Khera vi...@khera.org wrote:
On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Paul Mather p...@gromit.dlib.vt.edu
wrote:
 Personally, I think ZFS on i386 has become a losing proposition as of
 late.  I ran a ZFS-on-root FreeBSD/i386 10-STABLE system with 2 GB of
 RAM and it appeared to become very flaky with ZFS in its latter
months
 (I eventually switched it out for a FreeBSD/amd64 system).

I cannot fathom a sensible use case for using ZFS on pfSense at all.
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[pfSense] LDAP PAM auth with Local Database accounts?

2014-07-30 Thread Paul Mather
At our organisation we have a central LDAP database that contains 
administrative information.  For Unix purposes, it's only useful for 
PAM auth, as its schema does not contain the requisite Posix attributes 
required by Unix accounts.  Nevertheless, it is still very useful for 
password authentication because the 24/7 service our organisation 
provides for password reset and management can be leveraged when 
authenticating against this LDAP source.

On my FreeBSD and Linux servers, this means I can have the PAM auth 
component for services in pam.d work to do password authentication 
using the user's organisation password, yet all the account data still 
comes from local accounts on the system.  The upshot is that if the 
user forgets his or her password, they don't come to me, they go to the 
organisational 4HELP. :-)

Is it possible to use this kind of setup on pfSense 2?  It almost seems 
to work for me, but maybe I am doing something wrong.  The 
authentication part works, but, because there are no Group attributes 
in our central LDAP, the user seems to become a member of no groups 
when logging in.  This appears to throw pfSense for a loop. :-)

It would be nice if pfSense would fall back to Local Database 
attributes when LDAP doesn't provide them, or, maybe better still, if a 
new blended authentication method of LDAP auth + Local Database 
Attributes was available that used LDAP for auth but the Local 
Database for account information such as real name, groups, etc.

This latter approach is how applications such as Redmine use LDAP 
authentication.

Cheers,

Paul.
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Stefan Baur
Am 30.07.2014 um 16:43 schrieb Vick Khera:
 On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Paul Mather p...@gromit.dlib.vt.edu wrote:
 Personally, I think ZFS on i386 has become a losing proposition as of
 late.  I ran a ZFS-on-root FreeBSD/i386 10-STABLE system with 2 GB of
 RAM and it appeared to become very flaky with ZFS in its latter months
 (I eventually switched it out for a FreeBSD/amd64 system).
 
 I cannot fathom a sensible use case for using ZFS on pfSense at all.

I'm not consciously using ZFS for anything on pfSense, I *think* I
performed the default install, but it could be using ntfs or vfat for
all that I care. ;-) So I don't know why it's trying to use that - is it
normal for a default pfSense install or not?

I just saw the warning message and was wondering what to do about it.

-Stefan
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Espen Johansen
ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to things
like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has on the
fly checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native acls and
a few more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?

-lsf
30. juli 2014 21:44 skrev Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de
følgende:

 Am 30.07.2014 um 16:43 schrieb Vick Khera:
  On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Paul Mather p...@gromit.dlib.vt.edu
 wrote:
  Personally, I think ZFS on i386 has become a losing proposition as of
  late.  I ran a ZFS-on-root FreeBSD/i386 10-STABLE system with 2 GB of
  RAM and it appeared to become very flaky with ZFS in its latter months
  (I eventually switched it out for a FreeBSD/amd64 system).
 
  I cannot fathom a sensible use case for using ZFS on pfSense at all.

 I'm not consciously using ZFS for anything on pfSense, I *think* I
 performed the default install, but it could be using ntfs or vfat for
 all that I care. ;-) So I don't know why it's trying to use that - is it
 normal for a default pfSense install or not?

 I just saw the warning message and was wondering what to do about it.

 -Stefan
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Stefan Baur
Am 30.07.2014 um 22:09 schrieb Espen Johansen:
 ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to
 things like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has
 on the fly checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native
 acls and a few more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?

This is a firewall, not a fileserver, where such features do indeed make
sense.  And no bashing, just saying I don't care what filesystem
pfSense uses under the hood, as long as it works.  The fact that it
spits out a warning seems to indicate that it does not work and there's
something wrong, so I came here to ask.

-Stefan

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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Paul Mather
On Jul 30, 2014, at 4:09 PM, Espen Johansen pfse...@gmail.com wrote:

 ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to things 
 like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has on the fly 
 checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native acls and a few 
 more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?
 

I swear by ZFS on my regular FreeBSD systems (though I was having 
trouble with it on FreeBSD/i386 latterly).  I don't think there's any 
bashing of ZFS per se, just a wondering why you'd use it on a 
firewall appliance that's basically a nanobsd setup at heart...

Cheers,

Paul.

 -lsf
 
 30. juli 2014 21:44 skrev Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de 
 følgende:
 Am 30.07.2014 um 16:43 schrieb Vick Khera:
  On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Paul Mather p...@gromit.dlib.vt.edu 
  wrote:
  Personally, I think ZFS on i386 has become a losing proposition as of
  late.  I ran a ZFS-on-root FreeBSD/i386 10-STABLE system with 2 GB of
  RAM and it appeared to become very flaky with ZFS in its latter months
  (I eventually switched it out for a FreeBSD/amd64 system).
 
  I cannot fathom a sensible use case for using ZFS on pfSense at all.
 
 I'm not consciously using ZFS for anything on pfSense, I *think* I
 performed the default install, but it could be using ntfs or vfat for
 all that I care. ;-) So I don't know why it's trying to use that - is it
 normal for a default pfSense install or not?
 
 I just saw the warning message and was wondering what to do about it.
 
 -Stefan
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Espen Johansen
Also remeber that pfsense has had packages like freenas (for some the
Ultimate all in one home device).

-lsf
30. juli 2014 22:24 skrev Paul Mather p...@gromit.dlib.vt.edu følgende:

 On Jul 30, 2014, at 4:09 PM, Espen Johansen pfse...@gmail.com wrote:

  ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to
 things like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has on
 the fly checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native acls
 and a few more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?
 

 I swear by ZFS on my regular FreeBSD systems (though I was having
 trouble with it on FreeBSD/i386 latterly).  I don't think there's any
 bashing of ZFS per se, just a wondering why you'd use it on a
 firewall appliance that's basically a nanobsd setup at heart...

 Cheers,

 Paul.

  -lsf
 
  30. juli 2014 21:44 skrev Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de
 følgende:
  Am 30.07.2014 um 16:43 schrieb Vick Khera:
   On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Paul Mather p...@gromit.dlib.vt.edu
 wrote:
   Personally, I think ZFS on i386 has become a losing proposition as of
   late.  I ran a ZFS-on-root FreeBSD/i386 10-STABLE system with 2 GB of
   RAM and it appeared to become very flaky with ZFS in its latter months
   (I eventually switched it out for a FreeBSD/amd64 system).
  
   I cannot fathom a sensible use case for using ZFS on pfSense at all.
 
  I'm not consciously using ZFS for anything on pfSense, I *think* I
  performed the default install, but it could be using ntfs or vfat for
  all that I care. ;-) So I don't know why it's trying to use that - is it
  normal for a default pfSense install or not?
 
  I just saw the warning message and was wondering what to do about it.
 
  -Stefan
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Jim Thompson

 On Jul 30, 2014, at 3:21 PM, Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de 
 wrote:
 
 Am 30.07.2014 um 22:09 schrieb Espen Johansen:
 ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to
 things like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has
 on the fly checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native
 acls and a few more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?
 
 This is a firewall, not a fileserver, where such features do indeed make
 sense.  And no bashing, just saying I don't care what filesystem
 pfSense uses under the hood, as long as it works.  The fact that it
 spits out a warning seems to indicate that it does not work and there's
 something wrong, so I came here to ask.

tl;dr:  I wouldn’t run ZFS… yet.

I didn’t see the error message, you’re barking up a tree attempting to use it 
right now.

That said, there are certain advantages to ZFS, and there are internal 
experiments underway looking to use it for a future (64-bit only) release of 
pfSense.

The data integrity and resiliency (due to COW semantics  checksumming) (etc) 
is one thing.  I’ve had pretty good results turning on LZJB
compression and ‘copies=2”, which is nearly as good as a nanobsd image with 2 
separate slices, and, since you have a live filesystem,
has NONE of the drawbacks of the nanobsd approach.  One could even ‘checkpoint’ 
(snapshot) the zvol prior to any change (pkg install, config change, etc),
and, of course zfs send | ssh foo; zfs receive” makes it entirely trivial to 
keep your entire firewall backed up, rather than (just) the config file.

People who say, “I can’t fathom a sensible use care for using ZFS on pfSense” 
or “why use it to replace nanobsd?” are (likely) stuck in a 
system admin mindset/mentality(*).  I get the same pushback about bhyve (“why 
would you use that on a firewall?”) from people stuck in the same
headspace.   I’m not going to reveal everything here, because it’s going to be 
post-2.2 before any of this comes about, and I’m keeping the focus on 2.2.

In short: ZFS is not just about building a NAS.

Jim

(*) If there isn’t an O’Reilly book out about it, it seems to not exist to 
these people.
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Josh Reynolds

Sounds like the mikrotik metarouter feature.

Josh Reynolds, CIO
SPITwSPOTS
www.spitwspots.com

On 07/30/2014 01:34 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:

On Jul 30, 2014, at 3:21 PM, Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de wrote:

Am 30.07.2014 um 22:09 schrieb Espen Johansen:

ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to
things like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has
on the fly checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native
acls and a few more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?

This is a firewall, not a fileserver, where such features do indeed make
sense.  And no bashing, just saying I don't care what filesystem
pfSense uses under the hood, as long as it works.  The fact that it
spits out a warning seems to indicate that it does not work and there's
something wrong, so I came here to ask.

tl;dr:  I wouldn’t run ZFS… yet.

I didn’t see the error message, you’re barking up a tree attempting to use it 
right now.

That said, there are certain advantages to ZFS, and there are internal 
experiments underway looking to use it for a future (64-bit only) release of 
pfSense.

The data integrity and resiliency (due to COW semantics  checksumming) (etc) 
is one thing.  I’ve had pretty good results turning on LZJB
compression and ‘copies=2”, which is nearly as good as a nanobsd image with 2 
separate slices, and, since you have a live filesystem,
has NONE of the drawbacks of the nanobsd approach.  One could even ‘checkpoint’ 
(snapshot) the zvol prior to any change (pkg install, config change, etc),
and, of course zfs send | ssh foo; zfs receive” makes it entirely trivial to 
keep your entire firewall backed up, rather than (just) the config file.

People who say, “I can’t fathom a sensible use care for using ZFS on pfSense” 
or “why use it to replace nanobsd?” are (likely) stuck in a
system admin mindset/mentality(*).  I get the same pushback about bhyve (“why 
would you use that on a firewall?”) from people stuck in the same
headspace.   I’m not going to reveal everything here, because it’s going to be 
post-2.2 before any of this comes about, and I’m keeping the focus on 2.2.

In short: ZFS is not just about building a NAS.

Jim

(*) If there isn’t an O’Reilly book out about it, it seems to not exist to 
these people.
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Stefan Baur
Am 30.07.2014 um 23:34 schrieb Jim Thompson:
 tl;dr:  I wouldn’t run ZFS… yet.
 
 I didn’t see the error message, you’re barking up a tree attempting to use it 
 right now.

Again, I don't care what FS pfSense uses under the hood as long as it
works.  I didn't make a conscious decision to install/run ZFS, I firmly
believe I picked the default options during the pfSense install and now
I'm seeing this warning.  I don't insist on using ZFS at all.  If I can
and should get rid of ZFS to get rid of the warning, just tell me how.

-Stefan
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Jim Thompson

 On Jul 30, 2014, at 4:40 PM, Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de 
 wrote:
 
 Am 30.07.2014 um 23:34 schrieb Jim Thompson:
 tl;dr:  I wouldn’t run ZFS… yet.
 
 I didn’t see the error message, you’re barking up a tree attempting to use 
 it right now.
 
 Again, I don't care what FS pfSense uses under the hood as long as it
 works.  I didn't make a conscious decision to install/run ZFS, I firmly
 believe I picked the default options during the pfSense install and now
 I'm seeing this warning.  I don't insist on using ZFS at all.  If I can
 and should get rid of ZFS to get rid of the warning, just tell me how.

no pfSense we produce has an installer that will make a zfs filesystem.

Try again?


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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Jim Thompson

Well, you could use it for that (pfSense on pfSense), but there will be 
unnecessary overhead.

 On Jul 30, 2014, at 4:38 PM, Josh Reynolds j...@spitwspots.com wrote:
 
 Sounds like the mikrotik metarouter feature.
 
 Josh Reynolds, CIO
 SPITwSPOTS
 www.spitwspots.com
 
 On 07/30/2014 01:34 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
 On Jul 30, 2014, at 3:21 PM, Stefan Baur newsgroups.ma...@stefanbaur.de 
 wrote:
 
 Am 30.07.2014 um 22:09 schrieb Espen Johansen:
 ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to
 things like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has
 on the fly checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native
 acls and a few more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?
 This is a firewall, not a fileserver, where such features do indeed make
 sense.  And no bashing, just saying I don't care what filesystem
 pfSense uses under the hood, as long as it works.  The fact that it
 spits out a warning seems to indicate that it does not work and there's
 something wrong, so I came here to ask.
 tl;dr:  I wouldn’t run ZFS… yet.
 
 I didn’t see the error message, you’re barking up a tree attempting to use 
 it right now.
 
 That said, there are certain advantages to ZFS, and there are internal 
 experiments underway looking to use it for a future (64-bit only) release of 
 pfSense.
 
 The data integrity and resiliency (due to COW semantics  checksumming) 
 (etc) is one thing.  I’ve had pretty good results turning on LZJB
 compression and ‘copies=2”, which is nearly as good as a nanobsd image with 
 2 separate slices, and, since you have a live filesystem,
 has NONE of the drawbacks of the nanobsd approach.  One could even 
 ‘checkpoint’ (snapshot) the zvol prior to any change (pkg install, config 
 change, etc),
 and, of course zfs send | ssh foo; zfs receive” makes it entirely trivial 
 to keep your entire firewall backed up, rather than (just) the config file.
 
 People who say, “I can’t fathom a sensible use care for using ZFS on 
 pfSense” or “why use it to replace nanobsd?” are (likely) stuck in a
 system admin mindset/mentality(*).  I get the same pushback about bhyve 
 (“why would you use that on a firewall?”) from people stuck in the same
 headspace.   I’m not going to reveal everything here, because it’s going to 
 be post-2.2 before any of this comes about, and I’m keeping the focus on 2.2.
 
 In short: ZFS is not just about building a NAS.
 
 Jim
 
 (*) If there isn’t an O’Reilly book out about it, it seems to not exist to 
 these people.
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Stefan Baur
Am 30.07.2014 um 23:47 schrieb Jim Thompson:

JT no pfSense we produce has an installer that will make a zfs filesystem.
JT
JT Try again?

Well, mount doesn't show any mounted zfs filesystems (only ufs, devfs,
and msdosfs - the latter's where the config file is stored) which makes
this error message even more confusing - or actually, made it more
confusing until Adam Thompson's message, which just cleared things up:

AT Stefan: just ignore the message.
AT It's there because ZFS is in the pfSense kernel, even though it
isn't used today.
AT If you don't mount any ZFS file systems, and you don't tweak any of
the values, all it does is use up a bit of memory.
AT -Adam

So, I guess the issue is a non-issue.

-Stefan
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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Jim Thompson

 On Jul 30, 2014, at 7:20 PM, Paul Mather p...@gromit.dlib.vt.edu wrote:
 
 Despite all that FreeBSD ZFS love, I still would not recommend it on
 FreeBSD/i386-based installations (as the OP said he was using).  It is
 much more of a headache to use in that milieu, and, IMHO, doesn't get
 the testing and general care and feeding that the FreeBSD/amd64 version
 gets.

Note that I said any use we make would be amd64 only.

 Also, ZFS would not be a good fit on low-memory embedded hardware.
 There are enough problems getting ARC to play nicely on high-memory
 systems under memory pressure... :-)

What do you consider ‘low-memory’?

It’s getting difficult to put less than 4GB in some systems.  ZFS works really 
well on a 4GB system with around 100GB of ssd/m-sata.

auto-tuned ARC maximum is physical RAM less 1GB, or 1/2 of available RAM.  on a 
2GB system, this is 1GB, on a 4GB system, its 2GB.
Have you looked at memory usage in pfSense lately?  

Most of the ‘tuning guides’ consider fileserver/webserver/db applications.   
pfSense is none of these.  There are several applications that would
like to reliably write logfiles / rrd files, etc., however.


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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Dave Warren

On 2014-07-30 14:47, Jim Thompson wrote:

no pfSense we produce has an installer that will make a zfs filesystem.


I also get some zfs warnings during boot, and I absolutely guarantee you 
that I have not created or changed any partitions at all from pfSense's 
defaults.


Based on other messages in this thread, it appears that it's harmless 
and can be ignored since no zfs partitions are actually mounted, but the 
error still appears.


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Dave Warren
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http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren


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Re: [pfSense] ZFS warning message on local console during boot

2014-07-30 Thread Dave Warren

On 2014-07-30 13:23, Paul Mather wrote:

I swear by ZFS on my regular FreeBSD systems (though I was having
trouble with it on FreeBSD/i386 latterly).  I don't think there's any
bashing of ZFS per se, just a wondering why you'd use it on a
firewall appliance that's basically a nanobsd setup at heart...


Maybe it's just me, but I want my firewall to just work after power 
failures, on failing drives, etc is a big plus. Having a self-repairing, 
snapshotting file system sounds like a huge benefit, but I don't know 
what the drawbacks are in this context, so I can't make an actual 
recommendation.


Imagine having snapshots before updates or major changes so that things 
can be reverted to a working state, rather than relying on the piecemeal 
XML backups which, at best, brings you a moderately similar to the 
previous state configuration.


Being immune to corruption due to power-failures would be nice too; when 
I was running squid on pfSense, an unexpected power failure virtually 
always resulted in file system corruption being repaired, still 
resulting in a broken squid cache -- I have the impression that zfs 
would give me a lot more resiliency here (but possibly not, perhaps 
squid simply can't ever recover gracefully)


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Dave Warren
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http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren


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