Beginners questions

[Cassandra von Ahrcanburg]

Hello everybody!

I've read quite a few of the posts on this list and from what I can
tell there is a certain lack of females. :-) Oh well, with me being a
computer nerd and all I am pretty much used to being around men. :-P

I am a complete newbie to Dragonfly, to BSD not so much. I have been
using FreeBSD since 3.4 or somewhere in that area. Partly to educate
myself and partly because I find a few things about FreeBSD annoying
(don't worry, no rants here), I have decided to give Dragonfly a spin.
The Truecrypt/dmcrypt features of Dragonfly are also a real bonus. geli
works fine and I have no reason to trust it. But exchanging encrypted
data is impossible if the other person isn't also using FreeBSD.
Truecrypt and dmcrypt expand those possibilities.

Currently, I am planning two new machines: one (file-)server and one
workstation. The main difference won't so much be the hardware but
rather what they will be doing. I have tried to find out these things
using search engines and the like but I haven't been too successful. So
I decided to ask these things here. I hope you can forgive me. :-)

Graphics board
Since I am buying and I have no personal preferences towards AMD or
nVidia, maybe you can tell me which company is the better choice for
Dragonfly. I am a gamer at times, so I will be buying something in the
area of an X770 (or a similar AMD model, maybe an R9 280). I have asked
this question before in a German BSD newsgroup (concerning FreeBSD).
Somehow the discussion left the hardware-level very quickly and I had
to explain myself why I wanted a working graphics board under BSD
anyway. I can live without eyecandy like Compiz, but I like it just the
same. And I also use my computer for watching videos. There, I've
"said" it. :-)
My workstation will be able to boot both Windows and BSD.

HAMMER2
The second version of this legendary FS won't be out for some time yet,
as I have written on the list. I have read a few things that are
working now but very little about what the endgame is. Is there a
document out there that says what HAMMER2 will do?

HAMMER
The server I am building will mainly be for cold storage. I had
considered ZFS (and still am) because it also contains a volume manager
and I can "grow" the filesystem should the need arise. With "grow" I
mean: add one or more drives to the pool and let the FS heal itself.
Not elegant, but it should work fine. I plan to make a raidz2
(RAID6-like). Is this sort of thing possible with HAMMER? I know that
HAMMER won't do this by itself, I will need LVM with that. But can I
create a RAID6-like "thingy" :-) and grow it if I have to?

That should be all for now. Maybe a little more will arise as time goes
by. :-)

Cheers!
Cassi