Houston, I have a problem. After discovering that the FreeBSD Handbook was my friend, specifically the ZFS Filesystem chapter, I was able to clear the GPT and filesystem metadata from my disks such that ZFS would let me select them for inclusion in a pool.
I selected my 4 drives identified by slot, configured the pool, and built it. Poof, drives vanished yet pool lives. Zpool shows the 4 of them identified by slot in a happy pool.
The ZFS module Dashboard, Pools, and Filesystems display tabs are empty – the pool and its filesystems are not shown.
Did I goof or does Houston have a problem?
I forgot to mention it but OS is RockyLinux 8 on HL4 shop assembled system.
I just found that the HL8 Rough Start topic appears to be related. So I checked the Cockpit-ZFS version and found
cockpit-zfs.noarch 1.1.17-1.el8
We’re up and running so not critical. But would be nice to have the pools display work.
Hey DismalWizard!
Sorry about the ZFS manager. It is a newer rewrite of our old module and it seems to be having some problems on certain devices. We are working on fixing that now. If you want you can always use our old module by doing
dnf remove cockpit-zfs
dnf install cockpit-zfs-manager
until our newer module is in a more stable state.
I hope this helps!
1 Like
Stuff happens. I remember FreeNAS 9 fondly. You’re not that bad, nowhere near!
A bit of context here. I’m a former modeling and simulation developer who practiced in civilian nuclear power (reactor monitoring and operator training simulators) and Navy wargaming. I’ve been messing around with small file servers since 2017 and Unices since 1988 or so. I’m retired now.
Thanks for being so understanding!
That’s awesome, you have a lot of experience. How is retirement treating you? Must be fun to have time to mess around and tinker with homelabs!
I took your advice and reverted to the gnarly ZFS module. There are now drives!
I also added Samba as it was nagging me for it. I do have some Samba shares for Time Machine backups over on the dark side.
This one mostly has containers for various services like TrueCommand to look in on the TrueNAS boxes, Channels DVR, I did test drive Immich but find PeakTo a better alternative. It provides a global index and can run down individual images and the related tools. They get good money for that as they can read Adobe, Capture 1, Luminar, Apple Photos, Apple Aperture, and other popular photographer image catalogs.
Simulators are fun. The mischievous corner of scientific computing. We occasionally pranked the test team. But they were good at pranking themselves. They weren’t skilled computer operators and occasionally botched booting. A shared disk had to be switched about and images loaded resident. Miss one and a good bit of the sim was missing.
I just received my prebuilt HL4 today and believe I may be suffering from the same issue? Inserted 4 brand new drives, I can see them in the Houston UI but they won’t show up when following the manual and trying to set up a ZFS pool.
Pretty confused why a “burned in” machine is not letting me do basic things right out of the box 
It’s never fun when the new toy doesn’t quite work out of the box like you’d expect…
Did this suggestion to fall back to the older ZFS module work for you, @rborkows, like it did for Dave?
@Braeden-45Drives is there any information you’d like from @rborkows to help with fixing/improving the new module?
1 Like
I reverted to “ZFS” Cockpit module and it is usable.
Thanks for the recommendation and the followup.
Stuff happens. They are using Git but you still have to mark your tested known good release points. Hopefully, they are branching to release.
Hey Rborkows,
We are having some issues with the newer ZFS module, CPN was kind enough to show us some logs to help with our issue. The old ZFS module is tried and true and I appreciate everyones patience as we try and fix this issue with the new module!
If you need any help please let me know and I will try my best to get to a solution that suits your needs!