Sanoid on TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD)?

micah · July 30, 2023, 7:46pm

Hey all,
I wonder if anyone has found themselves in the same spot I am – I have a ZFS pool on my Linux workstation. I also have a FreeBSD-based TrueNAS Core box, which I use, among other things, as a back up of my Linux workstation pool.

On my Linux I use sanoid to take care of periodic snapshots (the right amount of hourly/daily/monthly/yearly). These are pruned over time by sanoid itself.
I also use syncoid to push the snapshots over to my TrueNAS box. But over there there’s nothing that would prune the old snapshots. Ideally I should be running sanoid on FreeBSD with the backup template. That would clean up the old snapshots.

Has anyone tried to install syncoid on FreeBSD? Does it play well with TrueNAS’s own modifications on top of clean FreeBSD?

mercenary_sysadmin · July 31, 2023, 6:19pm

Yes, there are plenty of people running sanoid on top of TrueNAS Core (and on FreeNAS, before that).

There’s nothing particularly special IIRC about installing sanoid on TrueNAS as opposed to installing it on FreeBSD; TrueNAS Core offers access to the main FreeBSD repos IIRC, so installing dependencies is the same. Basically, just follow the FreeBSD.readme:

github.com

jimsalterjrs/sanoid/blob/master/FREEBSD.readme

Syncoid assumes a bourne style shell on remote hosts. Using (t)csh (the default for root under FreeBSD)
will cause syncoid to fail cryptically due to 2>&1 output redirects.

To use syncoid successfully with FreeBSD targets, you must use the chsh command to change the root shell:
    root@bsd:~# chsh -s /bin/sh

FreeBSD users will also need to change the Perl shebangs at the top of the executables from #!/usr/bin/perl 
to #!/usr/local/bin/perl in most cases.

Sorry folks, but if I set this with #!/usr/bin/env perl as suggested, then nothing works properly
from a typical cron environment on EITHER operating system, Linux or BSD.  I'm mostly using Linux
systems, so I get to set the shebang for my use and give you folks a FREEBSD readme rather than
the other way around. =)

If you don't want to have to change the shebangs, your other option is to drop a symlink on your system:

root@bsd:~# ln -s /usr/local/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl

After putting this symlink in place, ANY perl script shebanged for Linux will work on your system too.