Another interesting problem cropped up in my quest to install BSD. The presence of a RAID adapter in my server that presents the disks as a virtual disk. Based on some research, it seems that ZFS doesn’t do well unless the adapter can use Initiator Target (IT) mode which presents each disk individually to the operating system.
Since ZFS seems to be the way to go for a modern FreeBSD installation, I would like to use it. ZFS does have some interesting features with the only drawback being memory consumption. I’ve got plenty of memory (192GB) so that’s not a worry.
There are some instructions out there on how to flash the Dell PERC H310 Mini to haveIT mode. They look reasonable, but there is a lot to it and I’d rather not do that right now.
Plan B is then to install FreeBSD on a VM on that server to try it out. I’m already familiar with LXD and it should work for this purpose. I already have LXD installed on the server but it was an old version. I don’t know if that would be problematic or not but it isn’t optimal.
To give myself the most stable base for this, an upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to the latest 24.04 LTS seemed wise. The simplest path for that seems to be going through an upgrade to 22.04 and then to 24.04. That wasn’t too hard but took a bit of time. A few questions about keeping current configuration or replacing it with new configuration came up around iSCSI (replace) and sshd (keep) but otherwise it was uneventful. I even improved my boot time by quite a bit by disabling the iscsi service (don’t need it) and changing the network wait to only look for the connected Ethernet port.
All in all, it took an hour or two to get everything updated. Now, I can finally start to install FreeBSD on LXD.