Recently, I found out that the ZFS pool on a FreeBSD is running out of space. There is no option to clean up this storage, but there are spare disks. So the next logical thing to do is to add 2 extra disks to the existing (mirror) ZFS pool.

This FreeBSD server is a virtual machine (VM), and after attaching 2 physical disks to this VM, I had difficulty identifying these disks. Well, I could guess it, but this is a production server, and I really don’t want to spend my whole weekend to setup this server from the backup. :)

On FreeBSD, we can run geom disk list to list all disks attached to the system. So let’s try this out.

root@freebsd1:~ # geom disk list | grep -E '(Name|Mediasize)'
1. Name: vtbd0
   Mediasize: 21474836480 (20G)
1. Name: vtbd1
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: vtbd2
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: vtbd3
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: vtbd4
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: vtbd5
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: vtbd6
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: vtbd7
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: vtbd8
   Mediasize: 6001175126016 (5.5T)
1. Name: cd0
   Mediasize: 0 (0B)

From the above list, there are 8 x 5.5T drives. Six of those drives are currently in use as the ZFS pool. This can be checked by running zpool status [ZPOOL_NAME].

root@freebsd1:~ # zpool status vault
  pool: vault
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0 days 09:57:17 with 0 errors on Sun Feb 28 07:46:48 2021
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        vault       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            vtbd1   ONLINE       0     0     0
            vtbd2   ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
            vtbd3   ONLINE       0     0     0
            vtbd4   ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            vtbd5   ONLINE       0     0     0
            vtbd6   ONLINE       0     0     0

If we look carefully, we can guess that vtbd1, vtbd2,…,vtbd6 are the 6 disks in use out of the 8 listed earlier. But, do we know for sure? Should we just assume that this is the case? Well, I don’t know about you, but I rather have something to backup my guess. Plus, it gives me an excuse to write this blog post.

So a few commands I would use to interrogation a Linux system for information related to disks are: udiskctl, blkid, lsblk, dmesg,…etc. Apart from dmesg, other commands weren’t available, and I’d thought that they couldn’t be installed on FreeBSD. dmesg didn’t give me any useful information I was looking for either.

Then I went back to Google search, and this time I hit a jack pot. There is actually lsblk command on FreeBSD provided by a package called, you guess it, lsblk.

Let’s install lsblk package.

root@freebsd1:~ # pkg install lsblk

After this, I can run lsblk to list all block devices.

root@freebsd1:~ # lsblk
DEVICE         MAJ:MIN SIZE TYPE                              LABEL MOUNT
...
vtbd1            0:64  5.5T zfs                                   - -
vtbd2            0:65  5.5T zfs                                   - -
vtbd3            0:66  5.5T zfs                                   - -
vtbd4            0:67  5.5T zfs                                   - -
vtbd5            0:68  5.5T zfs                                   - -
vtbd6            0:69  5.5T zfs                                   - -
vtbd7            0:70  5.5T -                                     - -
vtbd8            0:71  5.5T -                                     - -

Now, I can be sure that the two new disks attached to this server are: vtbd7 and vtbd8.

There a few other ways to list block devices on FreeBSD. You can read more at the following link: