I broke my FreeBSD home server - it's now running on SmartOS

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/115096681908613819

Tonight I made a simple, yet destructive (or at least partly) mistake: when I told FreeBSD which disk to destroy, I accidentally gave it the system disk of my little home server. This happened because it had the same size as the external SSD I had just plugged in, and I got confused.

I lost some reproducible configurations (the server’s name was in fact tempfbsd01), but I took the chance to run an experiment. My home server runs FreeBSD in read-only mode (that's the part I destroyed). From there, I manually enable the external drives (encrypted with GELI) and, in turn, the ZFS pools. Then I start the various jails and the (single, Proxmox Backup Server) VM.

Since I also have another test box running SmartOS, I decided to experiment: I connected the disks to it, created a FreeBSD bhyve VM on SmartOS, and passed the entire disks through to the VM. I reconfigured the FreeBSD VM with the bare minimum and booted it all up. The jails with BastilleBSD started without any issues - obviously the Proxmox Backup Server VM itself is still missing, but I’ll deal with that later.

I’m tempted to leave everything like this for a while.

And yes, for anyone wondering: I had fun

Well, we've found an issue

I wanted to try Tribblix on real hardware and install some cool window managers, but Xorg is blocking my way.

Although I've installed the all-xorg-drivers overlay, Xorg can't run on my Intel iGPU (HD Graphics 630), not sure why. I've tried running X -configure, but it doesn't seem to work either.

I hope someone in the community can help me. Maybe @ptribble himself can be of help

In the spirit of the recent #illumoscafe inaguration I'll share this guide from my recent #omnios setup.

I rented a very beefy (256GB ECC RAM 32/64 core AMD EPYC CPU) to build the infra for my personal projects on #illumos on #hetzner

The install was fairly painless although a bit involved, to anyone trying the same, here is a small guide:

+ Open a rescue image and take a note of the IP + netmask + gateway
+ Ask for a KVM through the support tab.
+ Attach #omnios ISO to the KVM and reboot the system
+ Enter boot menu (in the case of my server it was with DEL) and boot from the virtual cd drive.
+ Install as normal, it's fairly straightforward
+ At the end configure the system and set the networking configuration you wrote at the start. Remember to enable SSH daemon!
+ Reboot and go into boot menu again, change the boot order to boot from one of your disks.
+ This may not be needed under some cases, in my case the intel boot manager didn't recognize the illumos bootloader so I had to do this.
+ This will break some things, since Intel boot manager is the one that starts the rescue image, be aware that for future rescue operations you'll need to ask for a KVM (first three hours are free)
+ IMPORTANT, because this tripped me and it took me a bit too much time to find out. OmniOS disables VGA output by default, so while you are attached to with the KVM you'll see the output freeze, in my case it continued booting but without any VGA output. Wait a bit and try to SSH into it after a while.
+ You now have OmniOS in a beefy and cheap server from hetzner auction!

Hope this was useful!

#illumos #omnios is absolutely incredible. The system is very well designed IMO, I had already experienced the more cohesively designed #BSD but here it feels a bit *more* (although quite similar in some aspects to #freebsd of course).

Linux feels like a duct-taped amalgamation of random ideas, don't get me wrong I love Linux and all it represents, but it's a system that has been grown in any direction.

With Illumos instead it feels like you have orthogonal powerful building blocks you can compose into something greater than the sum of its parts. #zfs #dtrace #zones #crossbow it all works beautifully, both on their own and together.

After seeing how virtualized networking can be done in solaris, the docker networking stack feels so sad in comparison.

So far I'm very impressed.

I'm performing some tests of #illumos based distributions on some of the VPS providers I'm generally using.
Each of them has some "quirks and features". More about this in the coming days.

I tried to start some #illumos distributions in an old laptop, but after an almost successful process, the computer suddenly reboots, I suppose the kernel panics.

What are the recommended options in the boot loader to rise the odds of a successful boot ?

I learned two things about illumos. I still have not seen it yet, but I know it's a wonderful operating system

The installation procedure wants a dd of the ISO / USB image for which you need to use a whole USB device temporarily

I know that after my experiments with the wonderful Ventoy ISO manager, which none of the installation procedures of the illumos distributions I tried, seem to like.

I haven't got the skills ATM, otherwise I would have looked in both the Ventoy source code and the iso images build code of the distributions to see where the problem lies and then I would patch it.

I've bought a USB stick, a small one, only days ago which is already in use and cannot be freed up.

When I can buy another USB stick I'll use it first to install illumos before I shall use it for its assigned task.

Thank you for reading

^Z

Some links on :

#Illumos

https://www.illumos.org/
https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/
https://illumos.org/man/

#openindiana

https://www.openindiana.org/
https://docs.openindiana.org/handbook/getting-started/

#omnios

https://omnios.org/
https://omnios.org/download.html
https://omnios.org/info/ipsrepos
https://github.com/omniosorg
https://www.tumfatig.net/tags/illumos/

#tribblix

http://www.tribblix.org/
http://www.tribblix.org/Use/
http://www.tribblix.org/man/
https://github.com/tribblix

#smartos

https://docs.smartos.org/
https://wiki.smartos.org/
https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/
https://www.tritondatacenter.com/smartos
https://docs.tritondatacenter.com/public-cloud
https://us-central.manta.mnx.io/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/smartos.html#20250807T000218Z

Anyone running #illumos as a router/firewall?

My Opensense caved in last week and i am curious to try something new.

I needed an Alpine (Linux) zone on my #SmartOS server. I just created a new zone. Then, I wanted to see how much memory that zone was using: 2996K
Less than 3 MB for an "entire" Alpine Linux zone.
Efficiency, #illumos style!

The copy process, the backup process, of the storage device which I shall use to back up a another OS to, will free up the device to install illumos on, has just passed it's twenty and a half hour mark.
Since the process is so extremely slow, using my SBC to execute this task is perfect because the Raspberry Pi5 uses very little power.

At this rate I will have the backup completed in about 5 hours.

Note:
Back-up storage is allowed to be slow. Many decades ago, way in the beginning, tape storage was also extremely slow. In the days of the Commodore 64 the datasette was an annoyance for many, since it was extremely slow, however it was reliable given the fact that you used proper tapes.

It's beyond the screen that illumos gets the error on the ancient notebook

I executed a boot attempt of illumos on my ancient notebook.

There must be certain things that the bootloader does not like within the architecture of the fossil of a machine.

This was just a small test however the moment that I make the main machine free I shall spawn the illumos boot loader from that one.

That machine which I was very recently gifted as much newer hardware in comparison with the ancient notebook

I'm running a very slow task which has the goal of freeing up space on my external storage devices.

This task is slow because the device needs to be reformatted after the backup has been made. The problem with the device, is that the speed which is normally at 80MBytes / second has dropped all the way down to 1.80MBytes / second
The device is healthy the partition just went haywire because of the host that was writing on it.

I'm using my SBC for the task so that I have the other machine for other important work.

The free space is important because I need to install illumos, in order to play with the distribution that I've chosen.

When this microSD card is free I will be parking an installation which is on a SSD

That SSD will be used for illumos

The backup task will take about 16.5 hours given the transfer speed, which is now at 2.5MB/s

Preparing for illumos part I

The US west mirror is slow for me, so I went to Switserland

wget -c https://downloads.omnios.org/media/stable/omnios-r151054.iso

omnios-r151054.iso 11%[===> ] 34.69M 379KB/s eta 11m 4s

Illumos is an Open Source Operating System based on Solaris which has spawned in 2010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos?wprov=sfla1

Introducing the illumos Cafe: Another Cozy Corner for OS Diversity | Stefano Marinelli

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/08/18/introducing-the-illumos-cafe/

Post your stats :)
#illumos #omnios