20151205

Sat Dec 5 08:15:06 EST 2015 Went to bed at one, slept well, and woke up at eight. It's foggy this morning. Sunny (once the fog burns off) and forty-six today. Goals: - Work on personal server (which I'm tentatively calling blinky) - Given what the FreeBSD install offers, I guess I should get comfortable with gpart - Can I get the piece of shit Asus motherboard to MBR boot a disk with a GPT partition table? If not? Looks like it won't work. I guess I don't _need_ GPT.... The other alternative is to always boot from a temporary root partition on usb. Hmm... it didn't like an MBR disk either. With a GPT disk, bit just went straight into the firmware. With a MBR disk, I get as far as a blinking cursor. It looks like I've been using the installer FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img. I'm going to try FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-uefi-memstick.img.xz. Well, the uefi install starts to boot, but throws: Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode ... current process = 0 () Best case: something went wrong writing the usb stick. I'm waiting on this now: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1k In the mean time, what would it take to always boot from usb? - Unlike linux, we can't have just a /boot partition. We want a full root filesystem on the usb stick. Once we boot, we hand off to another root (even one on zfs). In /etc/loader.conf: vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:zroot/root" (...where 'zroot' is the pool name and 'root' is the dataset.) - It's probably simpler to use UFS rather than ZFS on the usb. - Once fully boot on the zfs root, we want to mount the ufs root on the usb with a symlink from the zfs /boot pointing to /boot on usb. That way, updates to /boot get written to usb without our having to remember to manually do so. - Do I need to partition the ZIL at this stage, or can I create it as part of an existing pool? http://www.overclock.net/t/1495837/ecc-works-on-am1/30#post_23302312 It looks like the reports that this motherboard supports ECC --- even screenshots of memory test results --- may be wrong. Sigh. It's unclear. I can't get memtest86+ to run. It instantly reboots or freezes. Went to Microcenter. Bought a stick of non-ecc ram. Same results. Sigh. Hung out at Ed's. Foggy tonight.

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