Seriously! Two of three 750GB hard drives that I’ve bought for a RAIDZ array have died and required replacement. Then this morning one of the replacement drives died. Stay far away from them if you value your data.
Out of business, Clear may sell customer data
You’d think he would know better!
“They had your social security information, credit information, where you lived, employment history, fingerprint information,” said Clear customer David Maynor, who is chief technical officer with Errata Security in Atlanta. “They should be the only ones who have access to that information.”
I guess that it just goes to show that even security professionals are willing to give up security for the sake of convenience. To be fair, air travel is absolutely lousy in this country and there is was a market for making it less painful.
My initial work with ZFS on my OS X laptop has left much to be desired. Let’s just say that on FreeBSD the code has been worked on more extensively and that it feels much more mature compared to the work that Apple engineers have done on OS X integration with ZFS.
The main snag is how OS X deals with mount points. Let’s say that you start out with /Users residing on your HFS+ partition and then create a new ZFS filesystem, and attempt to set the mountpoint to /Users. Well, the UNIX underbody understands this just fine and you’ll open up a shell into the ZFS filesystem. Finder and other applications might not pick up on the new mount and continue to reference the HFS+ volume. It’s a bit messy if you aren’t careful.
The other thing to be aware of is that you can’t just shrink down your HFS partition, then create a ZFS partition out of free space or convert a HFS partition to ZFS. The system will not realize that the ZFS module needs to be loaded on boot, and you could be stranded at the login screen if your home directory resides on a ZFS partition. It is extremely important that you use the diskutil command line utility to split your volume into an HFS volume and a ZFS volume.
I’m left a little disappointed and a little worried about the future at Apple. Especially when all mention of ZFS has been excised from product materials. Combined with Snow Leopard’s read only support for UFS volumes, I begin to worry that Apple is going to just sit in the dark and pretend that everything is just fine with HFS.
You would think that a few engineers who get PAID to integrate ZFS into the core of the OS would do work that would exceed work done by a few volunteers in the FreeBSD community. The FreeBSD community has seen the writing on the wall and has spent time and energy preparing themselves for a filesystem change. Linux developers might have objected to the licensing of ZFS, but they knew that ZFS represented a major change in storage management and began their own efforts to develop a similar solution in the form of btrfs. Filesystem development in the past few years has become very fluid, and I don’t think Apple realizes this.
I’m not about to give up and go back home, I’m running ZFS on my laptop as we speak, but I worry that I could be stranded if Snow Leopard doesn’t reveal any progress regarding ZFS.
For work, I’m coding a suite of utilities that understand virtualization and storage technologies to automate a lot of dull operations that administrators have to deal with on a day to day basis.
I plan on using libvirt, a virtualization API to query the hypervisor for virtual machines that are running on the systems. Ideally I’d like to get back some information about storage and then create backups. Libvirt has support for different storage objects, so I’m hoping that their binding to LVM has support for snapshots.
After using ZFS extensively on my FreeBSD box, I’m ready to take the plunge and use ZFS on my OS X laptop.
The main reason for moving to ZFS was to gain the ability to create snapshots since Time Machine relies on a secondary storage device to create backups, and my work and usage patterns emphasizes mobility. Being tied down to a USB drive so that Time Machine can run is just not going to work.
Originally I had planned to use a network share from my FreeBSD machine to do network Time Machine, but my apartment wireless bandwidth is tiny and my ethernet port on my laptop is a bit worse for wear after a travel through Europe so Gig-E does not function.
Anyway,
The first step is to download the latest binaries (or compile from source) from the Mac OS X zfs port.
The second step for me is to copy all the large chunks of data from my laptop, which is mostly in the /Users hierarchy. Deleting that data will free up a huge amount of space, which can then be dedicated to ZFS.
Shrinking down the HFS partition is the last step in the process.
OpenBSD Enters “I’m a Mac/PC” Ad Campaign War
When asked whether he thought the effusive advertisement was too bizarre to connect with the typical viewer, De Raadt said, “Shut that hole in your face, loser.”
Shocking and hilarious, if it were to really happen.