ZFS on Ubuntu Server Root documentation for SSH install.

[YosuCadilla]

I found the existing articles about installing ZFS on Ubuntu using the desktop cd quite informative and interesting, however this is not really an option for dedicated servers, which probably have 2 or more disks that can be used in a mirror or stripped configuration where ZXS would really shine.

I would gladly help to produce such documentation and/or a video (once I know the proper way this has to be done).

A related questions would be, since Ubuntu is officially including ZFS and it's recommending its use for LXD, is there any information available on when they plan to include it in their installation processes/wizards?

[YosuCadilla]

Recommendations and best practices for common use cases could also be a great resource.
I would gladly produce the content if I can get someone to guide me and oversee the content.

[ghfields]

If you are speaking of this wiki: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-18.04-Root-on-ZFS

The Step 2 example is a single disk. Other pool configurations can be used at this step. (See hint at end of step 2)
Step 8.2b could be changed to "ubuntu-server" for server install.

I don't think this highlights a bug in the writing of the wiki. Thanks for the offer of helping with other content creation. This probably can better arranged via the mailing list or freenode #zfsonlinux

[YosuCadilla]

Thank you for the pointers @ghfields
Indeed this is not about any bug, sorry. I'm used to other projects where we use the issues for all sort of topics, not just bugs.

I subscribed to the list yesterday, will post there as per your recommendation.

[rincebrain]

As an observation, given that https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1781601 got only one or two comments before the bots automatically marked the bug as irrelevant (#7659 is the relevant bug here), and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1779156 hasn't had a human response in 6 months, I'm not sure how much research they put into their recommendation, much less effort being spent on supporting it.

(I'm also linking those here so that people searching Ubuntu LXD here turn them up.)

(For completeness, I should also mention https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799497 where someone tried to help debugging but hasn't made progress.)

[phol]

To add to that, I think it would be great to also include the option to use the new ZFS 0.8 native encryption instead of LUKS for encrypting the root filesystem. It would remove the "number of moving parts" the setup has right now, however, I am not sure if zfs-initramfs supports unlocking at boot already? Personally I am also using dropbear with cryptroot-unlock to unlock over SSH.

I used a setup like described in the wiki for a while but I reverted to LUKS with ext4, since especially when using a lot of memory / performing a lot of IO operations, the system would lock and crash and performance was generally a lot worse than it was using ext4. Moreover, after unlocking, the filesystem would sometimes not mount.

I thought it might have to do with the complexity the setup had and would be curious if removing LUKS from the mix would resolve these issues.

[bunder2015]

Wiki documentation will need to be updated for 0.8 when it is released.

[rlaager]

This was discussed on the mailing list already.