Posts tagged with: filesystem

Links of interest for 22 Apr 2010 - 19 May 2010: Chrome Incognito Tracks Visited Sites - Lewis showed me this yesterday morning before posting this blog post. Guess incognito mode isn't as forgetful as you thought. Funny Photoshop Crash Reports - It's amazing what people write in these crash reports. Oracle on ZFS Whitepaper - Quite a useful whitepaper on running Oracle on ZFS. Warning, it's a PDF. Special Report: Can That Guy in Ironman 2 Whip IBM in Real Life? - Some great hard hitting quotes from Larry Ellison explaining exactly why Sun became such an easy takeover... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 17 Oct 2009 - 2 Nov 2009: ZFS Deduplication : Jeff Bonwick's Blog - Deduplication has just made its way into ZFS and Jeff provides a great explanation on what dedup it and why you need it, along with details on how to use it with ZFS. ZFS for MacOS X - One door closes, and thanks to Open Source, another opens. Apple cans ZFS project - It doesn't say much, but it speaks volumes. Monty, Stallman, MySQL, Oracle, and Sun: Open Letter Wars - Finally. Someone taking a subjective and clear headed view of the... Continue reading ►

Solaris 10 10/08 (u6) is due to be released within the next month of so (I don't have an exact date) and one of the great features to come with it is ZFS boot. You can already use ZFS boot on Nevada and OpenSolaris defaults to ZFS, but this will be the first release of officially supported Solaris 10 to have ZFS boot. People have been waiting for this for a long time, and will naturally be eager to migrate their root filesystem from UFS to ZFS. This article will detail how you can do this using Live Upgrade. This will allow you to perform the migration with the least amount of downtime, and still have a safety net in case something goes wrong. These instructions are aimed at users with systems ALREADY running Solaris 10 10/08 (update 6) or Nevada build 90 (snv_90) or later. Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 1 Jul 2008 - 30 Jul 2008: Direct Mounting of Files - As of snv_91, you no longer need lofi to mount a filesystem image, like an ISO. You can now call mount(1M) as you would a normal filesystem. DTrace IP Provider - Cool. The first step of implementing TCP/IP DTrace providers in Solaris has made it's way into snv_93. OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin - A great review of the features you can find in OpenSolaris 2008.11 from a Storage perspective, ie the stuff sysadmins want, but the other reviews never... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 21 Mar 2008 - 25 Mar 2008: Paper Enigma Machine - What a brilliant idea, and a great teaching tool too. Sun turns to lasers to speed up computer chips - Now this would be brilliant if Sun research proves to be a success. Sun's continually proving it is light years (excuse the pun) ahead of everyone else in the processor business and this is just another example. Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as "miserable failure" - I wonder how many more people are going to come forward now and bring their problems to light. All... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 27 Nov 2007 - 11 Jan 2008: 2008 Technology of the Year Awards: Storage - And the award for Best Filesystem goes to... ZFS, naturally. No other filesystem has been as innovative, with such wide spread adoption, recently. Official ZFS on OS X Page - Your source for bleeding edge ZFS on OS X from one of the ZFS developers at Apple. 2008 Technology of the Year Awards: Platforms - And the award for the Most Innovative Server OS goes to... well, Solaris 10 of course. Who else? shimmer - A great alternative to port knocking,... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 28 Sep 2007 - 13 Oct 2007: 'Hybrid' HDD Technology To Allow Data Access Without Booting - Nice to see the PC market is finally catching up with Apple. Apple computers have been able to do this for years. Firefox Is Going Mobile - I can't help but feel this is a little ambitious. Whilst it's a great idea, given the probable H/W requirements and Firefox's current memory munching issue, I'm going to need a whole PC in my pocket to use Firefox on a mobile. BUSTED! 11 Myths about Solaris on X86/X64 platforms - I'm... Continue reading ►

I stumbled upon a great article (via Ars Technica) by Jeff Bonwick, responding to Andrew Morton's claim that ZFS is a "rampant layering violation" because it cuts across the traditionally separate worlds of the filesystem, volume manager, and RAID controller. I think ZFS is a brilliant invention and believe it'll go far. It removes complexity and cost, improves data reliability and generally makes people's (both sysadmins & desktop users) lives soooo much easier. Too many times I've had to be the bearer of bad news and let a customer know their data is corrupt and they'll have to restore from backup. Most of the time we can work out where the problem has occurred and take the necessary steps to prevent or reduce the chances of it from occurring again. However there are times, particularly when dealing with 3rd party storage and it's associated software, that an explanation can't be found and I have to refer the customer to the 3rd party vendor. These problems are invariably due to over complexity in the storage stack. Whilst ZFS does have it's limitations (can't shrink or boot from ZFS just yet), work is in place to remove these limitations. Remember, ZFS is in it's infancy - all it's competitors have been in the public sector for many many years. One of the comments on Jeff's post caught my eye (I've copied part of it verbatim)... Continue reading ►