FreeBSD storage server

10 April, 2025 - Categories: BSD

Decided to go with a FreeBSD server setup on my old pc, and put some 8TB hard drives in it, setting up a ZFS RAIDZ1 network storage.

First small issues: I had a bad dns server in my home network config, and since i was using a "netinstall" kind of image that failed the first install. I repeated the setup (it still had most of my settings saved) but ... couldn't find the disk anymore i wanted to use - i'm sure i was just somehow temporarily blind and missed that "rescan devices" option.

Anyway, after putting in the settings manually, it installed fine.

So i set up the root password, set up a user, made sure the SSH server runs on startup, and put it over in the other room to run it headless. Turns out you cannot use "su" on FreeBSD without the proper permissions - so even if you know the root password, there doesn't seem to be anything you can do with it! And since ssh root login is also disabled, i had to haul the (now pretty heavy due to the disks) case back out and plug in screen+kb again to put myself in the "wheel" group.

That worked, and i also went on to enable root login (no password login though, just ssh keypairs).