My name is Philipp C. Heckel and I write about nerdy things.

Monthly Archives / January 2017


  • Jan 08 / 2017
  • 30
Administration, Linux

How-To: Using ZFS Encryption at Rest in OpenZFS (ZFS on Linux, ZFS on FreeBSD, …)

An upcoming feature of OpenZFS (and ZFS on Linux, ZFS on FreeBSD, …) is At-Rest Encryption, a feature that allows you to securely encrypt your ZFS file systems and volumes without having to provide an extra layer of devmappers and such. To give you a brief overview of what the feature can do, I thought I’d write a short post about it.

The current ZFS encryption implementation is not (yet) merged into the upstream repository (as of January 2017). There is a pretty big pull request which is still being reviewed, but because the feature is so incredibly cool (and because my colleague Tom Caputi developed it), I thought a sneak preview is absolutely necessary.

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  • Jan 01 / 2017
  • Comments Off on zfsu: ZFS utils for offsite backup, retention and maintaining a slow mirror
Administration, Linux

zfsu: ZFS utils for offsite backup, retention and maintaining a slow mirror

My laptop runs ZFS as its root file system (see this blog post) — meaning that I can snapshot my root file system and I can send it to another machine as a backup very easily. Unfortunately, while ZFS provides the raw functionality, there is no great tool to manage offsite backups and retention. To ease this pain, I wrote/forked and packaged a few helper scripts which I called zfsu, a collection of ZFS utilities.

It consists of the following tools: zfsu tx (aka zfstx) maintains a mirror of a ZFS pool over the network. zfsu ret (aka zfsret) is a simple script to apply local retention (destroy snapshots) of a file system and its snapshots. zfsu res (aka zfsres) is a script to resilver a slow mirror, e.g. a HDD disk if mirrored with a SSD.

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