On Thu, 9 May 2013, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 10:09:55AM -0500, Erik Anderson wrote:
>> On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Florin Iucha <florin at iucha.net> wrote:
>>
>>> The only way this is 'automatic and transparent' is if you buy a 
>>> server from Oracle with Solaris preinstalled and support paid off.
>>>
>>> Otherwise, you'll fiddle with hardware components or virtual drivers 
>>> until you get Solaris happy.  Which can be a long time and an 
>>> expensive process.
>>
>> Well that's a little defeatist, isn't it? :)
>
> No, just battle scarr?ed.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt [all 
> shredded].

I'm done with Solaris, too.  I used administered a Solaris box or two from 
the mid-90s until about 5 years ago.  Linux is just too much easier.


>> ZFS runs happily on FreeBSD (yes, this is a linux list, yadda yadda), 
>> and according to the vast majority of ZFS users, it's actually the 
>> preferred OS to run it on. Granted, FreeBSD doesn't have as complete 
>> hardware support as most Linux distros do, but it's *much* more 
>> approachable than Solaris.
>
> I'll give it some thought - I am interested in the end-to-end data 
> integrity and the regular scrubs, although due to time pressure I 
> abandoned the DYI for a nice Synology box.

It looks like there is some progress on getting ZFS working on Linux:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux

One of the biggest problems is incompatible licensing.  The ZFS CDDL is 
not compatible with GPL.  It seems that the problem is this part of the 
CDDL:

"Any litigation relating to this License shall be subject to the 
jurisdiction of the courts located in the jurisdiction and venue specified 
in a notice contained within the Original Software, with the losing party 
responsible for costs, including, without limitation, court costs and 
reasonable attorneys fees and expenses."

I have to say that I am glad someone is serious about data integrity 
issues because this limitation of our filesystems has been worrying me a 
little bit.  I had heard of ZFS but didn't know this is its main focus. 
Protecting the integrity of the data should be a high priority.  More:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Features

Mike