Bart Silverstrim's questions

I have two 1TB disks. I ran a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.10 using encryption + ZFS, which installed to /dev/sda.

It created the following:

Disk /dev/sda: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model:
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 917DAC1E-06D8-479B-AAC6-43FB711931BD

Device       Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1     2048       4095       2048    1M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2     4096    1054719    1050624  513M EFI System
/dev/sda3  1054720    5249023    4194304    2G Linux swap
/dev/sda4  5249024    9443327    4194304    2G Solaris boot
/dev/sda5  9443328 1953525134 1944081807  927G Solaris root


Disk /dev/sdb: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model:
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 4176D618-E056-4905-BCFE-7ACA909134CD

Lsblck shows:

sda                          931.5G
├─sda1                           1M
├─sda2           vfat          513M /boot/efi
├─sda3           crypto_LUKS     2G
│ └─cryptoswap   swap            2G [SWAP]
├─sda4           zfs_member      2G                              bpool
└─sda5           zfs_member    927G                              rpool
sdb                          931.5G
sr0                           1024M
zd0              crypto_LUKS   500M
└─keystore-rpool ext4          484M /run/keystore/rpool          keystore-rpool

Is there a way to turn /dev/sdb into a proper mirror of /dev/sda using RAIDZ with ZFS? I've found some notes and tutorials that seem to give parts (like this askubuntu question, but I think it would already need partitions configured and wouldn't be a drive mirror, or maybe having a full drive mirror configuration wouldn't be possible with this ZFS+Encryption fresh installation?

I have two Ubuntu systems and in the course of changing configurations something has become muddled.

I have disabled Unity in favor of gnome shell, the older style display of the desktop. Then I installed xfce 4. Seemed everything would be working okay, and for the most part it does.

Except I noticed that on one system there's something else controlling settings.

On one, if I right click the desktop, I get the menu with the options:

open in new window 
create launcher... 
create url link... 
create folder... 
create from template ->  
open terminal here 
paste 
desktop settings... 
properties... 
applications ->

On system two, right clicking brings up the menu:

Create new folder
Create new document ->
organize desktop by name
keep aligned
paste
Change Desktop Background

Additionally, even though I set the background with the xfce settings manager, on system two that background will appear for a few seconds before it's replaced by something that looks like a background from Ubuntu's original desktop. And it's being controlled by what comes up with the "change desktop background" when right clicking, which isn't the xfce settings manager.

On the first system, that right click does bring up the xfce settings tool.

In short, something is controlling/overriding the xfce settings on machine two, but I can't find what file or configuration tool is doing it. How can I get system two to behave as system one, giving control of settings and configuration of X to XFCE's tools?

When working remotely I set a server to force an fsck at boot time with the sudo touch /forcefsck command and rebooted.

After it restarted I checked in /var/log/fsck for the results of the disk check.
Both checkfs and checkroot said: Nothing has been logged yet

So where is it saving the results?