New server going up, what would you do?

[JWGlide]

Experts -

I decided to pull the trigger and order the FreeNas Mini box to replace my existing box. Current box is a much older machine with hardware limitations, and is starting to produce intermittent issues of various types.

So the new machine will be here this week, and I'm curious to know, what if anything, would you expert users do differently than you have done in the past? What mistakes/successes have you had that I can learn from?

This machine will primarily be used to store media and backups. I may set up Plex on it to serve music/video across the network, but I have not decided yet.

Most of the other machines on the network are Macs, and I'm curious about what, if anything, I should do differently in that case. Migration to Mac has happened recently in the last couple of years, I suppose I'm what you'd call a Windows power user(of sorts)

Migrating the data to the new machine - The data that is on the old machine will need moved onto the new box, a lot of forum posts on this, to use rsync. Seems reasonable. Does ssh NEED to be setup to do this? Or.. is there a step by step or a tutorial on ssh connection via a Mac? I know how to do it on a windows box, but I'm trying to learn here.

Thanks in advance, gang.

 

[kdragon75]

The data that is on the old machine will need moved onto the new box, a lot of forum posts on this, to use rsync.

Nonsense. Use zfs send/recv over netcat. It will preserve all of the ZFS options, permissions (but not users), datasets, and provide for a reliable transfer. Its a bit more fiddly but its a one time thing. Just make a recursive snapshot of the pool and send it over.
https://blog.yucas.mx/2017/01/04/fast-zfs-send-with-netcat/

is there a step by step or a tutorial on ssh connection via a Mac?

Open terminal and type ssh <user>@<FreeNAS>. Once a upon a time, Mac OS 10 was based on FreeBSD and shared many of the system utilities. Many things still work as a Unix admin would expect.

 

[Chris Moore]

Open terminal and type ssh <user>@<FreeNAS>. Once a upon a time, Mac OS 10 was based on FreeBSD and shared many of the system utilities. Many things still work as a Unix admin would expect.

I am sure there are many modifications, but Mac OS 10.14 and 10.13 are two of very few systems listed on the "UNIX Certified Products" list: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
It is probably just because they have the money to pay the licensing fee. There are some differences in the rsync implementation between FreeNAS and Mac OS though.
Still, I agree that ZFS send / receive is the way to go. @JWGlide , if you are able to connect all the drives to a single computer, it runs much faster locally than over the network because it eliminates the network bottleneck.

 

[Chris Moore]

Nonsense

rsync will work, so it isn't entirely nonsense, and some people are more comfortable with it. I have done both. Use ZFS send to get the big sync of everything, which took 14 days because it was 290 TB, then use rsync to just get the changes that happened while the first sync was happening.

 

[kdragon75]

rsync will work, so it isn't entirely nonsense, and some people are more comfortable with it. I have done both. Use ZFS send to get the big sync of everything, which took 14 days because it was 290 TB, then use rsync to just get the changes that happened while the first sync was happening.

Thats valid. I'm just more comfortable with zfs send/recv. It easy to take a second snapshot and send that over too. Repeat as needed to reduce the delta. I have seen people do this to migrate several TB of running* VMs with only about 20 min of down time doing this. Once the delta is small enough (all depends on change rates), shutdown VMs, one last snap and transfer, and reboot VMs on the new location.

 

[Chris Moore]

It easy to take a second snapshot and send that over too. Repeat as needed to reduce the delta. I have seen people do this to migrate several TB of running* VMs with only about 20 min of down time doing this. Once the delta is small enough (all depends on change rates), shutdown VMs, one last snap and transfer, and reboot VMs on the new location.

Probably, zfs send/recv would be the only way to be successful with that. I can't imagine rsync doing it. The server I was migrating was strictly a file server. Just moving from the old hardware platform to a newer, bigger, faster one.

 

[JWGlide]

I was unclear about both of my questions, and that is my fault.

With respect to moving the data -
Im going to set up the new machine with new drives and create a new pool and all new datasets. This is mostly because I have different needs now than I did when I set up the older machine, as well as a marginally better understanding of how FreeNas works.
That said, once I have done so, I will then need to take the actual data within the pools (music, movies, misc files) and transfer them to the new pool on the new machine. This is why I originally looked to rsync as the solution. I don't want/need to simply replicate the pool.

Worst case, what I CAN do, is transfer via one of the client machines once everything is set. As a rough example, I would have a share from the old machine, and a share from the new machine, and transfer the files manually. This is a bottleneck, for sure, the good news being that the urgency is fairly low and I can simply select files a few dozen GB at a time and move them at a leisurely pace. But that's less than ideal for reasons that everyone understands. So I'm looking for a better way, be it rsync, or ftp, or whatever it might be.

With respect to ssh via Mac -
I do know how to connect via ssh using the terminal (I think). But as far as the initial ssh setup, I'm a bit unclear. When I set up ssh on the current machine, I dug out my windows box, used putty and followed Fester's guide for generating keys and establishing the directories etc. This is the part that I do not know how to do with a Mac.

I appreciate the help and apologize again for my lack of clarity.
JW

 

[kdragon75]

You can definitely use rsync or ZFS send. With ZFS send, it would be limited in granularity to full datasets so rsync is probably a better fit. As for setting up keys on a MAC, I don't know but it should be similar to any other BSD system if you are familiar with that process.