Fun Stuff > CLIKC
The PT410X thread: Linux/BSD and Open Source Software for users and beginners!
bhtooefr:
Personally, I'm not a fan of most *nixes on the desktop (NeXTSTEP and its descendants being the sole exception), but they are quite effective for servers.
Just spent the weekend (well, and a little bit yesterday) migrating things from an old Pentium III box running Ubuntu Server 10.04, to a Dell CS24-SC (dual Xeon L5420 - basically, dual Core 2 Quad 2.5 GHz) running FreeBSD 9.1.
I would've stuck with Ubuntu, but I wanted to move to ZFS, and I didn't want to take the chances that come with ZFS root on Linux. And, while I liked OpenSolaris, that whole universe has become a wasteland of nearly abandoned software (for the Illumos side of the fork) and paywalls for security updates (for the Oracle side of the fork), it seems.
(I would've liked a rolling release model, although that comes with downsides too... then again, Ports has those same downsides (have to check the UPDATING file before updating) plus having to compile everything to keep up to date...)
ankhtahr:
What are the reasons for wanting ZFS so bad? I'm quite happy with ext4.
bhtooefr:
Let's see...
RAIDZ is like RAID 5 but integrated into the filesystem (reducing overhead (although ZFS is rather notorious for being a RAM hog for other reasons), increasing safety (no write hole), and reducing rebuild time of a degraded array if the pool wasn't entirely full)
The storage pool system makes for much greater flexibility in how the filesystem is managed (I want a new filesystem that's compressed and with certain security options enabled? Just make it, no partitioning required, and set a mountpoint) Yes, I know, Linux does have LVM, but it's nowhere near as flexible, and requires much more planning ahead. (Although, ZFS on FreeBSD requires more planning than it does on Solaris - a boot partition and a swap partition have to be outside of the ZFS pool (you COULD put swap inside the ZFS pool, but there's apparently a race condition in the FreeBSD kernel, that means that swapping to ZFS can freeze the system. Still, a tiny boot partition with the ZFS bootloader, and a swap partition, isn't that much outside of ZFS.)
Snapshot support is nothing short of excellent (major system change? Take a snapshot of your root filesystem beforehand, and then if the shit hit the fan, just boot from the snapshot). I don't think you can do that with a LVM snapshot?
Here's what I've got now:
--- Code: ---root@uncannyvalley:/home/bhtooefr # zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
zroot 36.4G 1.69T 192K /zroot
zroot/ROOT 383M 1.69T 383M /
zroot/home 13.2G 1.69T 13.2G /home
zroot/srv 18.1G 1.69T 2.76G /srv
zroot/srv/torrent 597K 1.69T 213K /srv/torrent
zroot/srv/torrent/downloads 192K 1.69T 192K /srv/torrent/downloads
zroot/srv/torrent/watch 192K 1.69T 192K /srv/torrent/watch
zroot/srv/www 15.3G 1.69T 15.3G /srv/www
zroot/tmp 485K 1.69T 485K /tmp
zroot/usr 4.15G 1.69T 366M /usr
zroot/usr/local 975M 1.69T 975M /usr/local
zroot/usr/obj 192K 1.69T 192K /usr/obj
zroot/usr/ports 2.24G 1.69T 1.86G /usr/ports
zroot/usr/ports/distfiles 387M 1.69T 387M /usr/ports/distfiles
zroot/usr/ports/packages 202K 1.69T 202K /usr/ports/packages
zroot/usr/src 615M 1.69T 615M /usr/src
zroot/var 568M 1.69T 3.43M /var
zroot/var/crash 197K 1.69T 197K /var/crash
zroot/var/db 560M 1.69T 551M /var/db
zroot/var/db/pkg 9.15M 1.69T 9.15M /var/db/pkg
zroot/var/empty 192K 1.69T 192K /var/empty
zroot/var/log 3.08M 1.69T 3.08M /var/log
zroot/var/mail 202K 1.69T 202K /var/mail
zroot/var/run 464K 1.69T 464K /var/run
zroot/var/tmp 202K 1.69T 202K /var/tmp
--- End code ---
You might notice that they all have the same available space - they're sharing the same storage, and grow and shrink on demand. I could constrain any of them as needed, but don't see the need right now. (The torrent directories aren't populated, mind you.) Some of them (/var/log, for instance) are compressed at the filesystem level, and it's almost as easy to make a filesystem on ZFS with custom attributes as it is to make a directory.
Bedrock:
I have not messed with ZFS much to be honest so I may do that as a project soon just to see the difference between the two and if there is a benefit in an enterprise environment over ext4.
Method of Madness:
I'm about to order a Samsung Chromebook for the fall. It won't be my main computer, my giant Windows 7 laptop will still have that, but I'll use it for travel/notes in class, etc. The reason I bring that up here is I was thinking of putting Linux on it. Does anyone know anything about Chrubuntu?
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