My personal FreeBSD 11.3 server (VPS) was running low on storage space. By using the VPS provider’s disk expansion option, I could easily grow the virtual disk. But then I wondered how to expand the filesystem on it. In my case, the filesystem is on a GELI-encrypted ZFS storage pool. So I had to resize the following entities. GPT freebsd-zfs partition GELI device on the GPT partition ZFS pool comprised of the GELI device After rehearsing on VirtualBox VMs, I took the following steps to get more free space for the server.

Recently, I wanted an encrypted working directory on a running FreeBSD system. The system was running on a plain (unencrypted) ZFS pool and there’s no plan to add disks to it. I needed the working directory only temporarily. I came up with the following options. Use GELI on a ZFS volume (zvol). Use GELI on a memory disk (md). Use PEFS on a directory. I excluded PEFS because I had very little experience.