On Aug 26, 2013 5:06 AM, "Alan McKinnon" <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 18/08/2013 21:38, Tanstaafl wrote: > > On 2013-08-18 5:16 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> While we're on the topic, what's the obsession with having different > >> bits of the file hierarchy as different*mount points*? That harks back > >> to the days when the only way to have a chunk of fs space be different > >> was to have it as a separate physical thing and mount it. Nowadays we > >> have something better - ZFS. To me this makes so much more sense. I have > >> a large amount of storage called a pool, and set size limits and > >> characteristics for various directories without having to deal with > >> fixed size volumes. > > > > Eh? *Who* has ZFS? Certainly not the linux kernel. > > > > FreeBSD > > You can get ZFS on Linux with relative ease, you just have to build it > yourself. Distros feel they can't redistribute that code. > > > > The bit you quoted shouldn't be read to mean that we have ZFS, it works > on Linux and everyone should activate it and use it and chuck ext* out > the window. > > I meant that we've been chugging along since 1982 or so with ancient > disk concepts that come mostly from MS_DOS and limited by that hardware > of that day. > > And here we are in 2013 *still* fiddling with partition tables, fixed > file systems, fixed mountpoints and we still bang our heads weekly > because sda3 has proven to be too small, and it's a *huge* mission to > change it. Yes, LVM has made this sooooo much easier (kudos to Sistina > for that) but I believe the entire approach is wrong. > > The ZFS approach is better - here's the storage, now do with it what I > want but don't employ arbitrary fixed limits and structures to do it. >
+1 on ZFS. It's honestly a truly *modern* filesystem. Been using it as the storage back-end of my company's email server. The zpool and zfs command may need some time to be familiar with, but the self-mounting self-sharing ability of zfs (i.e., no need to muck with fstab and exports files) is really sweet. I really leveraged its ability to do what I call "delta snapshot shipping" (i.e., send only the differences between two snapshots to another place). It's almost like an asynchronous DRBD, but with the added peace of mind that if the files become corrupted (due to buggy app, almost no way for ZFS to let corrupt data exist), I can easily 'roll back' to the time where the files are still uncorrupted. Rgds, --
