Newbie Questions re: Updating to OPNsense 22.7

[Sinister Pisces]

Hello! Congratulations on the release! I’m looking forward to installing it this weekend.

This will be my first major update, and I have a few questions.

If I do a fresh install with a backup of my current settings, is there anything that won’t be backed up? I selected a UFS file system when I set up the OS, and would like to switch to ZFS, but I really don’t want to have to start over from scratch. It sounds like the backup is meant to allow for completely replicating a previous setup, but I wanted to make sure.

ZFS.

• I’m not planning to do a mirror. I’ve got a 256 GB SATA SSD boot drive, and a 1TB NVME SSD storage drive, which will each be set up to show up a single, independent disk.
• Will it still be worth it to use ZFS? I’m mostly interested in the ability to do replication and increased ability to withstand corruption in the event of a power outage/cosmic rays/etc.
• I’m not sure how to set up a single disk in ZFS format yet. All my ZFS experience is with RAID. What do I need to do in the installer?
• I assume I’ll have an option to set ashift=12, since I’m working with an SSD that won’t properly report its own block size?

System is an Intel Pentium Silver N6005 with 16 GB of RAM. I assume this is enough for ZFS?

Thanks!

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Yes, if you have the memory capacity, using ZFS will give you a lot of benefits without any real drawbacks. See my thread on boot environments: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=25540.0
Just pick "stripe" and select the single target disk for your ZFS install.
ashift=12 is the default in FreeBSD nowadays.

[Sinister Pisces]

Yes, if you have the memory capacity, using ZFS will give you a lot of benefits without any real drawbacks. See my thread on boot environments: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=25540.0
Just pick "stripe" and select the single target disk for your ZFS install.
ashift=12 is the default in FreeBSD nowadays.

Awesome! Something easy for once.


I have 16 GB of RAM installed; I think I've got more than enough for boot disk--and even a spare data disk--in ZFS format.


Have you done the fresh-install-with-backed-up-config method of updating the system before? I looked at the official docs and it sounds easy enough, but I'm not sure if it's going to automatically install the plugins I added and configure them, as well. If not, that's fine, since I've only installed some themes, but I'd rather know before I do it. I'm also assuming it'll completely restore my entire network setup, including interface configurations and static DHCP assignments.