On Friday, June 27, 2025 7:51:04 AM CDT Stuart Henderson wrote: > On 2025-06-26, Robert B. Carleton <r...@rbcarleton.net> wrote: > > I haven't tried it, but I contemplated trying the OpenBSD iSCSI initiator > > iscsid(8) and using FreeBSD to provide a ZFS zvol block device as a > > target. > > > > You'd still have to fsck OpenBSD filesystems on partitions from the iSCSI > > drive, but you would get at least some advantage from having ZFS serve up > > the storage. I didn't do any testing though, so I still don't know how > > well it would work. Maybe someone else has tried it. > > That's not going to get you history, it would still be an FFS filesystem
You know, the context of that was storage for vmm virtual machines which I wasn't sure would work well over NFS. Maybe storing virtual machine drives on NFS isn't a problem. I didn't test that either... On the other hand, I did spend some time NFS mounting ZFS datasets on OpenBSD hosts and that worked just fine. It allowed me to fully use ZFS features like snapshots, compression and de-duplication which seemed to work okay. I was a little put off with how complicated ZFS is, and the command line interface. It also added another OS distribution to manage in my home lab. I eventually decided I didn't need all that, so I'm back to using an OpenBSD NFS server, with a combination of pax, rsync, and dump for backups. It fits for my use case.
