Finally, after two years of renovations and two children, I am revisiting the idea of a small home server. I don’t expect it to do much:
Whenever I’m accessing a remote system (even when using SSH in my internal network) I prefer to start a TMUX session. That way, if I get disconnected (for instance) during the middle of a package upgrade, that process just continues and I can reconnect at a later time without issues (if tmux is not yet installed or you’re not using it yet, I highly recommend reading up on it and taking a bit of time to get used to the basic concepts. I used this quickstart a couple of years ago).
tmux new -s sessionname
Install the required zfs package:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install zfsutils-linux
Then find out which drives you want to use:
sudo fdisk -l
In my case, I wanted to use the two 1.8GB drives (/dev/sdb and /dev/sdc) in a mirror configuration. I don’t have a hundred movies to fill a drive, most space will be taken up by photos and system images.
sudo zpool create mypool mirror /dev/sdb /dev/sdc
Check the pool status to verify that it is as intended:
zpool status
The pool automatically gets mounted on /mypool with root:root as owner. I changed the owner/group to my own user
sudo chown <user>:<user> /mypool/ (replace <user>)
Dieter Vansteenwegen (ON4DD) 