Things I wish Linux… oh. Crap.
So I got all up in arms about “the unix”. I looked at the available options, and decided “Hey, UFS2 has what I want, mostly!”, and FreeBSD has ATA hotswap. Perfect!
I downloaded FreeBSD 6.0, and tested it out. Man, I have to admit that, sure, it doesn’t have an effervescent installer, but to get up the bare bones system for a server, it’s a snap. So I got the basic install up, then went into the ports and started walking down my checklist, adding packages like a maniac. And it went pretty easy. Sure there’s some BSD-isms, like “/usr/local/etc”, but they make sense, and the installer usually gives you a heads-up.
Was there a problem? …Yes. The same problem that moved me from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 2: Postfix and my IMAP server should always have a TLS option. Always. That’s a dealbreaker. Now, on FreeBSD it’s not that bad, because you can go into /usr/ports and start building things. No “what’s the dependancy, aw hell”… it just works. Mostly. Except the 6.0 version of Dovecot doesn’t work with the 6.0 version of GNUTLS. So, bah.
I’d have to get my fix elsewhere.
Now, my other rant was that I wanted creation date and extended attributes. Just like I had in OS/2. Because OS/2, as my friend Chris described my opinion: “sprouted fully formed from the head of Zeus”. Well… Enter JFS.
So I gave up and stuck with Linux. To get where I wanted to be, I:
- Broke my mirrored set
- Created two new md devices, a 256MB “md1″ and a 280GB “md2″, both running in degraded mode on my second drive
- Created a volume group on md2, and a full-span logical volume (lv0) on that volume.
- formatted md1 as ext2, and lv0 as JFS
- used star to back my root filesystem over to the new lv0
- set up md1 as my /boot partition
- installed grub
- pulled the old drive
- rebooted, then cursed god, re installed the old drive, and created a /dev directory with MAKEDEV in it
- rebooted again
- checked everything out, bagged my old drive, installed the new one.
- ran “sfdisk -d /dev/sdb >sfdisk /dev/sda“
- Added the drives to the mirror sets
Of course, I did kind of have to go through a “14-through-16″ because I forgot to re-run grub on the new drive and set the bootable flags, but, hey, let’s gloss over that.
The end result? My little trip into “Captain Ahab” land has seemed to work, and I now have creation date. Of course, they all say “april 23, 2006″ but, meh. I win, sort of. And when I get two bigger drives, perhaps those 750GBs all the kids are raving about, I can just move my volume set over to a new drive, without any of this ’star’ and ‘MAKEDEV’ nonsense.
As a bonus, a little bit of OS/2 lives on. Team OS/2 for-evar!