Linux 3.4 and btrfs

[koffiejunkie]

I'm not tempted by any of the NAS type distros - it means sacrificing an entire machine on just one task. I'd rather roll my own FreeBSD box and do other stuff with it too.

 

[Tinuva]

I have been testing zfsonlinux out and I'm not yet convinced I want to trust my data to it. Crucially, when I pulled a drive from a raidz, I had it occasionally refuse to offline that drive until I reboot the box, after which it would refuse to bring up the degraded raidz or rebuild it. I might end up just using FreeBSD for it, if I can rearrange my hardware to make space for it.

Well I definitely won't use it at work

What you mention however is a little bit concerning, part of the reason I want ZFS is exactly for raidz, and if I can't rebuild it after a failure... /sigh

That means I will have to consider FreeBSD

 

[koffiejunkie]

What you mention however is a little bit concerning, part of the reason I want ZFS is exactly for raidz, and if I can't rebuild it after a failure...

It's not so much that it couldn't rebuild. It's that it said it could not use one of the two good drives (out of three) because it is busy. I couldn't figure out why that was happening, I assume it's something to do with zfsonlinux since nothing else can use a ZFS partition anyway.

 

[Tinuva]

Interesting. Well that made me play a bit with Debian/kFreebsd and it seems ZFS works like a charm on this OS/Kernel combination. All the ZFS utilities are there as well, and you can use Freebsd's PF on a Linux userland. Definitely much better than using Nexenta by miles.

I still prefer Debian over Freebsd, so I might go with this option instead. Very impressed thus far, and for a storage server at home, this should be perfect.

 

[koffiejunkie]

All the ZFS utilities are there as well, and you can use Freebsd's PF on a Linux userland.

Interesting observation. I've found there are a few places where it uses FreeBSD packages rather than the GNU/Linux ones. Netstat, for example. Pretty much everything that interfaces with the kernel, which makes sense, but results in tools that work differently and produce different output.

 

[Tinuva]

True that, I have seen that as well, ie. the inet-utils package is mostly freebsd packages, it makes sense because those applications interact with the kernel.

But anything else still exist, except for wine, which seem is not there at the moment. Mostly I am happy with the debian apt package management system which I am quite used to by now, especially building apt repositories and packages for myselfas opposed to learning ports from scratch (even though ports are widely praised).