User Blogs

I have recently made the switch as a Linux user from LUKS, LVM and ext4 to ZFS, ZFS, and ZFS. I started it with Ubuntu, which conveniently offered me an encrypted root on zfs option which worked very well for me in general. However, every time I had to interface with systemd it felt like a chore, when what I really wanted was the old school UNIX feel I got from Slackware. And now I've converted to Devuan 4 "Chimaera" on ZFS, which is based on Debian 11 "Bullseye", which is as close to that as I'm willing to get given the amount of work I want to do. In the process, I've had to mount my old zfs filesystems on my new system gracefully, and this is how I went about that.

This is based on a number of documents, beginning with OpenZFS Debian Bullseye Root on ZFS. There are some notable changes. View the original document and follow along:

One of my favorite features of modern filesystems is the sparse file, where "empty" portions of files are unallocated, so they don't consume any space. This allows oversubscription of disk blocks, so long as you never actually complete fill all of the files at once. But one common problem of sparse files is that they tend to grow, and there is often no way to solve this problem in place. But there is, with ZFS.

This site, my glorified blog, started out on Drupal 4. It wasn't until Drupal 8 that there was finally a single official way to handle putting media into nodes, with a media reference field and a media embed filter. Between then and now I used first the venerable img_assist and then the image_filter module, both of which fell by the wayside after D7. I replaced them both using php custom filters, but php in the database is now deprecated for security reasons.

...as soon as I can get hosting... because my host is still stuck on PHP 7.4. This means that I'm still stuck with D7. But this blog is about converting my site from D7 to D9. I was able to preserve everything, it seems, down to text formats — but all of them were refusing to display because they had references to missing filters, so it made it look like none of my content was present.