More questions about raw volumes
I'm anticipating migrating to an unsupported OS (FreeBSD). I know how to do this and and I know the up-/down-sides. Last year, I carried out a number of experiments with FreeBSD, block storage and a nanode. It all worked exceedingly well.
A few weeks ago, I asked about unattended boots of Linodes with raw boot volumes. I never got an answer. Can Lassie reboot a Linode with a raw boot volume upon power restoration (or user command)? Can you point me to the Cloud Manager button/switch that controls this?
The second question I have is about the Finnix recovery partition… Can I install my own software there…for example my backup recovery software?
Lastly, can I resize a Linode with raw volumes (and expect my ZFS filesystems to survive)?
Thanks in advance…
-- sw
2 Replies
caker
Linode Staff
Hello!
Lassie doesn't care what your filesystem is. It will issue a boot job if your Linode exits (shuts down or crashes - but it must "exit") without a Shutdown job being responsible.
Finnix can do a lot of things - you can even install software - but it's temporary. I'm not sure what level of UFS (or ZFS or other FreeBSD filesystem types) it can read or write to - since it still is built atop Linux kernel. But, nothing stops you from making your own recovery Configuration Profile and booting into it - for example.
With raw or not-understood filesystems, you can resize the underlying device larger but the filesystem within you'll need to do on your own. In other words, when we don't speak the FS on the device - we only resize the device. This only works for going larger. Trying to reduce the size of a device when we don't speak the filesystem will error out - with no action taken.
If you mean resizing a Linode from one plan to a larger one - or taking maintenance migrations and so on - yes, the block devices are copied over bit for bit.
Hope that helps!
-Chris
@caker writes:
Lassie doesn't care what your filesystem is. It will issue a boot job if your Linode exits (shuts down or crashes - but it must "exit") without a Shutdown job being responsible.
OK, thanks… I guess maybe an experiment is in order.
Finnix can do a lot of things - you can even install software - but it's temporary.
My backup app is written in Python so I'd need to install Python 3.x and the backup app on Finnix. I plan to keep the actual backups on block storage or object storage.
With raw or not-understood filesystems, you can resize the underlying device larger but the filesystem within you'll need to do on your own.
OK, thanks…that's sort of what I figured.
If you mean resizing a Linode from one plan to a larger one
That's exactly what I had in mind. My idea was to start off with a nanode to keep the cost down while I'm building the server and then expanding it to full size just before I'm ready to switch the IP addresses.
Thanks for your help.
-- sw