Expanding a GELI-encrypted ZFS pool

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.
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Growing a ZFS Mirror Pool

I have a tiny home server for my family. It’s based on Atom N2800 CPU and runs FreeBSD 11.2 with a two-disk ZFS mirror. Originally it had two 500GB disks, but now it has a 500GB and a 1TB ones because one of them was replaced due to a failure. As the Handbook says, the available space of a mirror pool is limited by the size of the smallest disk. So my server can still get only 500GB from the total space of 1.
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Mounting ZFS Root failed when an external USB drive is connected

Last week, one of my FreeBSD 11.2 servers failed to boot with the following error after freebsd-update. Mounting from zfs:zroot/ROOT/default failed with error 6; retrying for 3 more seconds It was the first time I encountered this type of error. After struggling for some hours, I was able to boot the server by disconnecting an external USB harddrive, which I had prepared as a secondary backup storage. But since then, I had been wondering what the root cause was.
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Encrypted Temporary Storage with GELI

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.
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Migrating a live system from GEOM mirror to ZFS mirror

I had been wanting to migrate a FreeBSD system on a GEOM mirror (gmirror) to a ZFS mirror. After several rehearsals on a VM, I have finally achieved that goal with the following steps. Load ZFS-releated kernel modules and set a tunable to use 4K sector drives. sudo kldload zfs sudo sysctl vfs.zfs.min_auto_ashift=12 Remove one (da0) of the two disks (da0, da1) which make up the gmirror (gm0).
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