zfs-remote-mirror | detailed tutorial on setting up a remote ZFS mirror | Continuous Backup library

Step one, is of course, to install FreeBSD. If this sounds daunting to you, take a look at the excellent [Handbook](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/). There’s different ways to do this based on what platform you’re using but here’s a run down of some answers to the questions the installer will ask you on an i386/amd64 target. Do not connect your USB drive yet. Congratulations. You are standing in a root shell west of a fresh system, with a boarded network interface. [There is a small mailbox here](http://steel.lcc.gatech.edu/~marleigh/zork/transcript.html), but we’ll soon disable it. Before we continue, a word about FreeBSD partitions. Old wisdom was to split out /usr, /var and sometimes other aspects of the directory hierarchy onto different partitions. This has a few benefits, the most obvious is that some branches, especially /var tend to grow with system logs and other detritus. If these were allowed to grow unchecked, they might consume the entire disk which brings out edge-case complications. Splitting them off mitigates this, but with the system’s specialised usage such growth isn’t likely to be a problem, and it’s nothing a quick check can’t solve. There was another argument to be made for performance; different branches have different read/write profiles, and splitting them reduced fragmentation for the read-mostlies. This is still true, but not significant on flash media due to uniform seek times and not really worth the hassle on a dedicated system like this. More than a moment’s system tuning is for high-performance servers, and if we were interested in that we wouldn’t be using old hardware. Let’s keep it simple. Finally, swap space used to be best placed at the edge of the platter (the last sectors) as the most sectors pass per rotation there. This reason goes out the window with flash, but it’s still a good idea to put the swap at the end, it makes it easier to grow the partitions if we ever migrate to a larger card. Thankfully, the FreeBSD installer will choose all of the above tweaks by default if you use guided mode.
Choose install from the Install / Shell / Live CD dialogue.
Choose your desired keymap. (I use UK ISO-8859-1)
Name the machine (knox is a good name).
Deselect all optional system components (doc, games, ports, src)
Choose Auto (UFS) over the entire disk. Defaults are usually fine.
Set your strong root password.
Set up IPv4 with DHCP unless you know better.
I don’t bother with IPv6 as Irish ISPs haven’t heard of it.
Your clock is usually UTC, so say yes.
Choose your timezone.
Disable all services on boot. We’ll configure them manually.
Do not add users now. We’ll do it later.
Choose Exit from the final menu.
YES, you do want to enter a shell to make final modifications.