2.5 KiB
| title | tags | date | author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Root ZFS Encryption, Mirroring, and Remote Unlocking on Ubuntu |
|
2023-07-26 | Tommy |
While Unbutu supports ZFS on root filesystems with an easy snapshot and rollback mechanism called ZSYS, ZSYS is soon going to be deprecated and the installer does not offer an easy way to setup mirroring. In this guide, I will walk you through how to set up Ubuntu with root on ZFS, mirroring with both the root and EFI partitions, and remote unlocking + boot into a snapshot with ZFSBootMenu.
Enter the Shell
Enter the shell on your Ubuntu Installer:
Partitioning the Disk
Esentially, we need a 512MB ESP partition for ZFSBootMenu and a / partition for the rest of the system. If you are using a single disk, just make those 2 partitions on your disk. If you are planning to do mirroring, set up both on of these partitions on each disk.
There are a variety of tools you can use, but an easy to use one would be cfdisk.
cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1
cfdisk /dev/nvme0n2
Mirroring the ESP partition
Skip this if you are not doing mirroring
While the EFI specs do not support mdadm, we can setup mdadm with metadata v1.0, which will be put at the end of the parition and allows it to boot.
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level 1 --raid-disks --metadata 1.0 /dev/nvme0n1p1 /dev/nvme0n1p2
Setup the ZFS partition
This part is mostly based on the official ZFSBootMenu guide with some changes to work around some not-so-great instructions there.
Creating the zpool
Getting the Disk ID.
First, we must get the disk IDs from /dev/disk/by-id. The official guide uses the dynamically assigned drive identifier (/dev/sda, /dev/nvme0n1, etc), which is not what we want to do with zpools, since it will cause problems later on.
Installing ZFS-Utils
sudo apt install zfsutils-linux -y
Create the encryption key
echo 'SomeKeyphrase' > /etc/zfs/zroot.key
chmod 000 /etc/zfs/zroot.key
For non-mirroring setup
sudo zpool create -o ashift=12 -O compression=zstd -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O atime=off -O encryption=on -O keylocation=file:///etc/zfs/zroot.key -O keyformat=passphrase -o autotrim=on -m none zroot /dev/disk/by-id/nvme-SAMSUNG_MZQL21T9HCJR-00A07_XXXXXXX-part2