Debian Wheezy, UEFI / EFI, GPT, RAID1, encryption, LVM, ZFS (zfs-on-linux)

Author: movax20h
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54m 3s Lenght
58 Rating

A detailed tutorial on installing Debian Wheezy (RC1, amd64) on two drives with RAID1 (mirror), with encryption, LVM and ZFS, using UEFI booting and GPT partition table. Debian installer: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ VMware player can be downloaded for free from VMware website. Edit *.vmx configuration file, add in: firmware = "efi" bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE" Using windows only because I need to experiment a bit with partitioning and stuff, before actually installing Debian on my 2 SSD drives. Also on my motherboard / graphic card, UEFI booting is working fully, and I am still trying to figure things out. I used VMware, because my normal choice for simple virtualization, VirtualBox / Debian, was unstable when using EFI booting. I am going to run Xen on that setup too, by the way. UPDATE: After updating video bios on my graphics card (Gigabyte Radeon 7970), everything started working perfectly. Virtualbox on the other hand still have some issues, GRUB menu in EFI mode, is very slow (need to few minutes). I finally installed it just as on the video. Still have 24GB left on LVM, for expansions of /var, /, etc. I however found 500-600MB for /boot may be sometimes to small if you are kernel developer and you are using debug kernels (otherwise I only can fit there 2 debug kernels). 2GB would be probably better. When doing zpool, add -O ashift=12, so it will use 4096 sectors, even if device or encrypted device lays about sectors. All other layers (luks, dm, lvm), should properly align embeded data. If you are using SSD, you may change "luks", to "luks,discard" in /etc/crypttab. This way TRIM support will be supported, for a small decress in security. For repeating password, use key=/root/secret.txt (random but readbable password), chmod og-rwx it, and backup it (on paper maybe)!

Comments

  1. Awesome tutorial. Thanks a lot!
  2. This would be a great video if only you could go through the menu options more slowly. You were going a bit too fast for me.
  3. great video thank you.. The accent was fine too :-), do not worry ..
  4. Great tutorial! Thanks a bunch!
  5. I''m having a problem with EFI too. After restarting the machine I get the following from grub: error: file not found grub rescue>
  6. i think grub still looking for sda(x) and because sda doesn't exist that is why sdb doesn't boot I guess
  7. after time I followed your tutorial everything works fine except EFI. I did the steps after the installation dd if=/dev/sda1 so on so on....I compare both partition sda1 and sdb1 and I got the same result as you. I build the md2 it works fine after the reboot so everything looks exactly like your tutorial except for one thing. I expect after erase disk sda from the VMachine the system boots without problem but it doesn't, any clue?. I mean your tutorial make sense for me but sdb doesn't boot
  8. hi I request a tutorial about RAID administration! things like faulures and assembles, snapshots, rezise LVM etc etc :)
  9. flash works for me (but I try to not use it most of the time, I just do not like it). I never had problems with codecs for years now (most time using smplayer/mplayer for videos, sometimes vlc or totem, for audio I use mpd+sonata). Steam is a bit more problematic, but possible. I am using small Ubuntu schroot to keep steam and all games, and it works with some tweaks to graphics drivers. I think I will create a steam install tutorial for Debian soon. I am very happy with Debian in general :)
  10. yeah but what about proprietary software such as flash, codecs ans steam?
  11. Debian wheezy obviously :) Debian testing or sid if you want having more fun.
  12. which distrbution do you like as a main opratve system bro?
  13. Thanks. I am from Poland, living in Switzerland. It was just my first try in making youtube videos, so it is not the best. My accent is terrible, and it was too long. Would think about other one soon :)
  14. wow!! man this is the best tutorial I've ever seen!! keep doing tutorials! where are you from buddy? I say "hi" from Canada but I'm from Mexico :)
  15. When creating new partion table you need to select EFI (GPT), then you should be able to create efi boot partition. Is your hard drive empty (brand new), or it is reinstall / dual booting? Are you sure you booted your image using efi and not bios (legacy mode)? What motherboard you have? You may try checking on console (ALT-F2, then enter for shell), by 'dmesg | grep efi' (without quotes), if it shows something it means you are using efi, if it displayes nothing, you are using BIOS for booting.
  16. Few not mentioned things, I noticed later. When doing zpool, add -O ashift=12, so it will use 4096 sectors, even if device or encrypted device lays about sectors. All other layers (luks, dm, lvm), should properly align embeded data. If you are using SSD, you may however change "luks", to "luks,discard" in /etc/crypttab. This way TRIM support will be supported, for a small decress in security. For repeating password, use key=/root/secret.txt (random password), chmod og-rwx it, and backup it!