[Discuss] ZFS on Raspberry Pi?

[Kent Borg]

I did VMs at home a long time ago, and persisted through quite a few 
generations of the technology (some Redhat paravirtualization I forget 
the name of to QEMU SW emulation to real KVM), I learned a lot, but I 
finally became exhausted. Getting the networking set up was always such 
a pain. I would refer to my notes from the previous time I did it, and I 
would figure it out again, but I didn't do it enough to have it ever 
become easy. And then I still needed to set up whatever I wanted to run 
inside each VM.

And then there was the proliferation of cumbersome QCOW images I needed 
to keep track of, and that was annoying.

Maybe it has become easier, but I haven't dipped in recently, I don't 
know the details.

In this specific case the e-mail server (with a little shell use by me) 
will be the only server thing I'll be running at the location in 
question. Collapsing the whole thing down to (1) configuring Postfix and 
Dovecot again* on a newer OS version and (2) putting 2-device ZFS raid 
under it, seems a lot simpler without any extra virtualizing layers.

* I lied. I also run a DNS server, so the e-mail server itself resolves 
to the local NATed address when I am on that network. And I run DHCP 
server because I want a few things at static addresses and whatever 
internet router box I am using today is always who-knows-what-quirky…but 
now that I have finally moved to openwrt, maybe I should move DHCP 
there, heck, my current config files might be usable as-is.

Maybe I'll later set up a second Pi 4 (if they ever become available 
again at prices we used to think Pis should be) and do some ZFS send 
stuff to keep it as some version of a ready spare. They could both sit 
in the corner making no noise.

-kb, the Kent who is currently waiting for components to arrive.