Mikrotik RouterBOARD

Mikrotik (www.mikrotik.com) provides an interesting platform for creating a custom router/switch/wireless access point, the RouterBOARD.

The Mikrotik RouterBOARD RB493G includes the following:

• Atheros AR7161 SOC with 256MB RAM
• 9 port Gigabit switch
• 3 mini-PCI slots. You can add a wifi N card and switch to AC later on.
• 1 USB port, but it’s fairly non standard as explained in http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb493g .
• 1 microSD slot.

It can be bought for 130 € at LandaTel (LandaShop): http://landashop.com/catalog/mikrotik-routerboard-rb493g-gigabit-ethernet-p-1880.html

Growing a ZFS pool

Growing a two disk mirror zpool by replacing disks is easy:

1. Replace the first disk with a higher capacity disk (we're going from 2TB to 3TB disks): zpool replace -f pool ata-WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-xxxxxxxxxxxx ata-Hitachi_HDS5C3030BLE630_xxxxxxxxxxxx
2. Wait for the resilver to complete (about 5h).
3. Replace the second disk: zpool replace pool ata-ST2000DL003-xxxxxxxxxxxx ata-ST3000DM001-xxxxxxxxxxxx
4. Wait for the resilver to complete again.
5. Expand the pool by telling it to use the extra space: zpool online -e pool ata-Hitachi_HDS5C3030BLE630_xxxxxxxxxxxx
6. Just in case, tell the pool to expand also the other disk: zpool online -e pool ata-ST3000DM001-xxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks to the following links for describing the procedure:

http://www.itsacon.net/computers/unix/growing-a-zfs-pool/

http://www.itsacon.net/computers/unix/growing-a-zfs-pool-update/