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ZFS and LXC
I wonder if someon can help?
Have successfully installed the base LXC system and added Samba and Joomla 2.5 and had a play. Flushed with success, I added 3 x 2TB disks to my system (HP micro server) with the intension of adding ZFS to the base LXC system and then re-installing Samba and Joomla and Wordpress. Configuring ZFS looks relatively straight forward, but installing it has been a pain. Have tried all the Linux "spells and Incantations" I have found on the web to install ZFS --- all have failed --- I am beginning to feel like Harry Potter at a "spellling" class --- I am worried if I continue I might turn myself into a frog.
Main failure seems to be that after all the incantatioins the zfs module cannot be found when executing modprobe zfs. Can anyone point me in the right direction so I can continue playing?
Thanking you in anticipation.
Derek
Replies (3)
TBH I'm not sure...
Reply 1That's weird...
Reply 2Because of the slimmed down TurnKey installer I understand why you can't do it during install, but once installed I don't understand why you couldn't install it. Other than a few custom packages, TurnKey is basically Debian (inc vanilla Debian kernel).
Regardless I'm glad you worked around your issue. Out of curiosity did you document what didn't work? And/or use a specific tutorial or something? It might be worth us working out why it doesn't work OOTB.
Installing Ubuntu PPAs on Debian/TurnKey not recommended
Reply 3Whilst Ubuntu is derived from Debian (as is TurnKey), it's not binary compatible (while TurnKey is binary compatible with Debian), so unless you know exactly what you are doing, installing software from Ubuntu PPAs on TurnKey (or Debian) is generally considered a bad idea! add-apt-repository is an Ubuntu utility, that whilst is installable and usable on Debian/TurnKey, doesn't follow best practice for setting up repositories, plus makes adding Ubuntu PPAs really easy, so we figure including it on a server distro (where stability should be king) is also a bad idea.
Regardless, if you want to use ZFS on TurnKey (and/or Debian), then I'd recommend looking at the Debian wiki ZFS page. Unfortunately, the Debian wiki can be a bit hit and miss and the info can sometimes be a bit out of date, but it notes that the package you'll want to install is called "zfsutils-linux". The "contrib" repo should be enabled by default, so you should be able to install it like this:
apt update apt install zfsutils-linux -y
That is quite an old version, but (assuming you are using TurnKey v16.x) then there is a newer version in buster-backports. To enable buster-backports and install the newer backport:
cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-backports.list <<EOF deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports contrib #deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports non-free EOF apt update apt install -t buster-backports zfsutils-linux -y
Hope that helps.
But running on the assumption that LXC is somewhat like OVZ in implementation, ZFS would have to be installed and working on the host system. In the case of OVZ (and I assume LXC too) as the container doesn't actually have it's own kernel (and drivers etc) it doesn't have it's own filesystem. As such it's really just piggy backing off the host.
As for installing ZFS on the host OS, assuming that you are using TurnKey then it should be the same for any default Debian install (v13.x = Wheezy; v12.x = Squeeze). I've never used it so I can;t really comment beyond that...