Zfs

O.k. from this  point I’m assuming you have created your zfs shares via the zfs command and renamed appropriately like so…..   (if you havent setup cifs yet then check read this)

zfs set sharesmb=on protected/backup

zfs set sharesmb=name=backup protected/backup

Now to check your current shares type…

sharemgr show

zfs

zfs/protected/backup backup=/protected/backup

zfs/protected/photos photos=/protected/photos

Now its time to look at NFSv4 ACL’s. This page has a great explanation of ACL’s and how to set things up. http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=939

There is some funky ways of modifying the default “time slider” services to do the work for you, but i like a bit more hands on. Generally so i know what is happening in the background, but the time slider can be sometimes overkill creating snapshots every 15 mins if not configured properly.

On a side note i’ve yet to get my head around the SMF stuff properly… Anyhow onto creating snapshots.

To list all of your current snapshots;

zfs list -t snapshot

This is a handy script to remove all snapshots….

for snapshot in `zfs list -H -t snapshot | cut -f 1` do zfs destroy $snapshot done

As always : at your own risk. ;)

O.k. here is the latest from atomic magazine… I’m talking about RAID 0 (stripe) here.

Software RAID (i.e. windows stripe) is faster (both in throughput and seek time) than the “hardware” fake RAID built in to most new mother boards. Apparently it doesn’t matter about the stripe size of your raid either…. Software raid still wins??

I’m a bit skeptical about this, and will have to en devour on a few tests to conclude whether this is true or not…

Oh no. I’ve managed to get this error before. And it was right after i applied compression to the rpool zfs filesystem. Upon the next reboot i was greeted with this error message;

Error 16 : Inconsistent filesystem structure

For me it was a show stopper and i had to go into recovery. So i’ve learnt my lesson - Not to touch the rpool zpool.

I was lucky enough to have put my data within a zfs filesystem (rpool/virtual) i created within the default rpool zpool.  I use this spot for my VirtualBox virtual machines.

I’ve had a play with WHS but eventually got annoyed with its lack of performance. Yes i know its not built for performance and typically is used just as a backup / simple store with duplication as redundancy, just i couldn’t stand the speed of the thing. If you were ever unlucky enough (even post power pack 1) to do a copy during the “data moving” the performance was even worse. On a positive note nothing beats it if you have a heap of non-similar sized disks that you want to put together (with redundancy) as a single shared storage pool.

ZFS compression as of OpenSolaris 2008.11 has a few types to choose from.

lzjb (default) | gzip | gzip-[1-9]

They are used via the zfs set compression=gzip poolname command.

The following test was quickly done out of personal interest - and is in no way scientific!

I have a AMD cpu with 3 cores (2.4Ghz). The data i copied to each of the shares consisted of video / documents / pictures and music. The first test i have done is based on compression only (i have not measured throughput)