First of all KUDOS to Debian’s new release this month, Debian 10 (Buster).
Notable to me is the effort for reproducible binaries, which aligns with my security Source Certification Contract (SCC) goals of Are You Who You Say You Are? Trust the Source, User.
Debian’s Buster release PR accordingly:
Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 91% of the source packages included in Debian 10 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.
Good, enough validation. Now let’s cover my little work effort to bring ZFS On Linux into the Debian Live image. This effort is due to provide our projects with reliable GNU/Linux infrastructure using the ZFS to ensure perfect data safety. Since the Debian installation images don’t support ZFS as the root filesystem yet, the provided Debian ZFS Live Image eases this process while also serving the purposes to have a recovery live image.
Our git repository of Debian ZFS Live Image provides currently two branches, master and zfs-linux-0.7.13. The latter contains the zfs-linux-0.7.13 source tar ball including the full original zfs git repository as well as its pre-build packages for Debian 9 and Debian 10 for your convenience. The master branch does not contain these transitory blobs, as they will be replaced with the next zfs-linux versions.
To produce said Debian ZFS Live Image, you can run the following steps on either Debian 9 or Debian 10:
- run debootstrap01.sh, debootstrap02.sh and debootstrap03.sh – but follow the remarks at the end of the script to switch over to the chroot environment or to leave the previous entered.
- run deblive01.sh, deblive02.sh, deblive03.sh and deblive04-iso.sh – but again, follow the remarks at the end of the script to switch over to the chroot environment or to leave the previous entered.
By now you should have produced a hybrid Debian ZFS Live Image. You may utilize the additional scripts s01.sh – s04.sh on your target machine, booted with this new live image. The debian-zfs-live content has been propagated into the image and is available at /root/debian-zfs-live.
Enjoy!
