TL;DR: There may come a time when you need to build a ZFS pool in a temporarily degraded state. Reddit user u/mercenary_sysadmin describes how this is done, and this post provides additional commentary.
The approach uses a temporary file in place of the disk, then taking it offline resulting in a degraded pool. When the physical disk is available, the file can be replaced with the actual disk in the pool.
Read more...
Homelab
Last month, my homelab experienced an incident that resulted in service disruption for 3 hours and 8 minutes, and because I like to cosplay as a sysadmin in my free time this is a post-incident analysis. The effects of the disruption were mostly external, mainly affecting the main site and ytrss, internal systems remained unaffected.
A virtual machine hosted on Linode needed to be moved between physical hosts for urgent and unplanned maintenance.
Read more...