RitualClarity Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 BTFS is indeed not ready for prime time. It isn't as "mature" as ZFS. I got that from a Linux fan. His hope like others in the same boat is that someone will start to work on that heavily and develop it to a point that some major company sees the value and starts to really develop it. Something about the differences in licensing. Linux being a little easier to use and implement into the corporate structure not to mention seamless integration into what many are already using. I have never heard of those solutions you mentioned. They look so cool. I like the MooseFS.
Pixie-K Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Ohh a thread where we rant about computer issues.... My "Frankenputer" has upgraded many a time over the past several years, and it's usually been easy going. Now and then I hit a bump in the road, and that bump tends to turn into a mountain, that ends in a cliff over a valley. The name "Frankenputer" is a play on words for Frankenstein of course, being that it started as a motley amalgamation forcefully slapped together from at least 5 different dead computers. One day I was upgrading the operating system from XP to Win7, and the Power Supply Unit decided to catch fire. It literally burst into flames violently. Visible flames were seen in the back grate... I'll never forget that smell. Luckily that particular case had a quick release lever on the PSU mount, so I had to pull the plugs and throw it out my window with an oven mitt. OH WONDERFUL the voltage seemed to have got all fucky during that episode and killed my motherboard. Two fun things to replace OH JOY. Motherboard number two. a capacitor exploded while I was fiddling around in the case trying to wedge special foam between the HDD's and the case mounts for sound dampening. I nearly pissed myself when that happened. OK Computer is all fine and dandy, just the way I want it. I'm in the middle of playing a nice game of CSS and my monitor starts to artifact. Oh great, experienced this enough times to know the video card is dying. Open it up and find out that dust has literally FROZEN the fan into place. I now give my PC full maintenance once a week. Dusting, connector checking, looking for damaged wires, pull ram and cards out and clean the connectors, all that fun stuff. I'll even open up my video card.
prideslayer Posted January 27, 2014 Author Posted January 27, 2014 BTFS is indeed not ready for prime time. It isn't as "mature" as ZFS. I got that from a Linux fan. His hope like others in the same boat is that someone will start to work on that heavily and develop it to a point that some major company sees the value and starts to really develop it. Something about the differences in licensing. Linux being a little easier to use and implement into the corporate structure not to mention seamless integration into what many are already using. ZFS is patent encumbered by Sun/Oracle and NetApp, that's why they diverged a few years ago and the official one is so far ahead in terms of version # and features. OpenZFS is doing their best to catch up. There are other licensing problems with Linux as well due to incompatibility between CDDL and GPL. Oracle now owns both Btrfs and ZFS; Sun invented ZFS, Oracle invented Btrfs, and Oracle bought Sun. I have no idea where the dust is going to settle with all that. I have never heard of those solutions you mentioned. They look so cool. I like the MooseFS. MooseFS is really good, if the FUSE issues would get corrected in fuse4bsd. It may be more stable on linux, but I hate linux too much to bother finding out.
RitualClarity Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Oracle now owns both Btrfs and ZFS; Sun invented ZFS, Oracle invented Btrfs, and Oracle bought Sun. I have no idea where the dust is going to settle with all that. Fudge,, Fudge, Fudge, not again. I wasn't aware that Oracle owned BTrfs and ZFS. I know they bought Sun a few years ago I just wasn't aware that they were the ones developing BTfrs. No wonder my Linux friend encouraged me to keep using Exf something instead of BTFs. I actually at one time even thought of using Mac because it was going to get ZFS. That died to the wayside when Oracle decided to buy Sun. Fudge me. .. It may be more stable on linux, but I hate linux too much to bother finding out. So you like BSD more?
prideslayer Posted January 28, 2014 Author Posted January 28, 2014 Oracle now owns both Btrfs and ZFS; Sun invented ZFS, Oracle invented Btrfs, and Oracle bought Sun. I have no idea where the dust is going to settle with all that.Fudge,, Fudge, Fudge, not again. I wasn't aware that Oracle owned BTrfs and ZFS. I know they bought Sun a few years ago I just wasn't aware that they were the ones developing BTfrs. No wonder my Linux friend encouraged me to keep using Exf something instead of BTFs. I actually at one time even thought of using Mac because it was going to get ZFS. That died to the wayside when Oracle decided to buy Sun. Fudge me. .. Haha.. This has been the case for several years now, Oracle bought Sun in 2010. You don't have to worry too much with btrfs, it's GPL'd and is now a collaborative effort between a lot of the big names other than Oracle. Red Hat and Intel are both involved as well. I think it will probably overtake ZFS, eventually, due to that. OpenZFS will be forever playing catchup with the official version if they intend to keep it backwards compatible. It may be more stable on linux, but I hate linux too much to bother finding out. So you like BSD more? Very much so, yes. I started playing around with both of them in the (very) early days, and settled on FreeBSD. Been a happy user since 2.1.0, almost 20 years now. There are a great many stupid design decisions that linger on in linux to this day, and even the ones that have been fixed still give me shivers because the mentality that lead to the decisions in the first place is still there. I fiddle around on occasion with different flavors, but for anything other than playing, I use FreeBSD. The biggest idiocy in linux, for me, is the memory overcommit which lead to the OOM killer. Of course the brain damaged /proc namespace and idiotic su/wheel gibberish melts my brain, as does the fact that it simply can't decide if it's trying to be a BSD unix or a SysV unix. I do enjoy watching Linus tear down people on lkml; the async_probe/udev stuff from 2012 was hilarious. Even if it were technically equal or even superior, unless the differences were vast, I'd still probably pass due simply to the GPL. Bring on the flames and holy wars, I'm a veteran.
RitualClarity Posted January 28, 2014 Posted January 28, 2014 OOM Killer... dam. That just looks like all kinds of stupid. It is the job of the linux 'oom killer' to sacrifice one or more processes in order to free up memory for the system when all else fails. "Sacrifice". that doesn't sound good at all. Memory Over commitment... dam. I can't tell which is more stupid. Guess I can name them both as stupid as all hell. One going hand in hand with the other. OOM killer needed because of the "design" of the memory management requires such a device. .. I am not a programer by any length of description. However I cannot see how in any way these two things are ever needed or should have ever even been considered. Thanks Pride. I think I might have some fun with my Linux friend... hahaha. Boy will I have some fun with him. I sent him an email with some of this. I am sure he will have a big smile on his face. I have found a very nice article on the differences and must say I do like the BSD reasoning at least my geek side. Don't really understand how to do many of those things but a hacker friend does. He stated Unix based OS's (like FreeBSD) are generally easier to custom configure and customize to a greater degree due to its structure and commands used. That article goes a bit more into to differences. I like some of what I read.
prideslayer Posted January 29, 2014 Author Posted January 29, 2014 I had a CP/M machine for a while Hal.. I *think* you're older than I am, but I'm not 100% sure As for linux, it's just monumentally stupid. Another example: In unix, the 'su' command (switch user) is used to run commands as a different user. Mostly it's used for a normal administrative user to run things as the root user when needed. It requires that the user know the root password, and that they are a member of the administrators group, called 'wheel'. For many years, the manpage (documentation) for su on linux (GNU su) said this: This program does not support a "wheel group" that restricts who can su to super-user accounts, because that can help fascist system administrators hold unwarranted power over other users. RMS, the jackwagon that wrote that, has a reason as insane as his reasons usually are. I could go on and on. Other than it being childish and poorly designed, it just doesn't do anything *best*. Anything anywhere being done on Linux can be done better with a different OS, usually a free one, though not always -- Windows and the Mac are far better GUI desktops/workstations than any free thing for example, and that's unlikely to change any time soon. X11 is really just.. terrible.
prideslayer Posted January 29, 2014 Author Posted January 29, 2014 If you really did want to burn your friend, tell him to look at the FreeBSD ports of linux. CentOS, Fedora, and Gentoo are all available as 'ports' in FreeBSD. Installing them will let you run (just about) any linux binaries, usually better than linux itself runs them.
RitualClarity Posted January 29, 2014 Posted January 29, 2014 If you really did want to burn your friend, tell him to look at the FreeBSD ports of linux. CentOS, Fedora, and Gentoo are all available as 'ports' in FreeBSD. Installing them will let you run (just about) any linux binaries, usually better than linux itself runs them. We use to talk about structure and other things r/t Linux vs Windows. This would have been late xp era. Some issues and such. I helped him see some of the issues with Linux however he preferred it over Windows. I preferred Windows over Linux mostly because I need a stable gaming platform and don't feel like fiddling around with emulators and the issues r/t them. He moved away and now is in a different state and we rarely get to discuss the way we use to. He is running a computer shop/gaming shop and it takes most of his time doing so. However it is still fun to poke him once in a while. It might take a month or so before he responds. With the comment on FreeBSD and ports. I understood that BSD has an Linux emulation layer that is quite good depending on the kernel that is needed. Are you stating that there are "full ports" of Cent-OS, Fedora etc that run from BSD itself or do they use the emulation layer?
Halstrom Posted January 29, 2014 Posted January 29, 2014 I had a CP/M machine for a while Hal.. I *think* you're older than I am, but I'm not 100% sure In my teens early 80's, my dad had a CP/M machine he used for his home business, I was learning basic on Vic20 and Apple2E at the time so ended up as his "SysAdmin" of course, many a hour spent using the disk sector editor to rebuild his files after he backed up a blank floppy onto his months data disk by putting the wrong disks in Drive A & Drive B, even tried M/Basic programming with a compiler on it before I realised C64 had more potential
RitualClarity Posted January 29, 2014 Posted January 29, 2014 Your talking about the Commodore 64 when referencing C64 correct. I had one of those as well. I had a tape drive and a disk drive. Couldn't do disk to disk copies.
Halstrom Posted January 29, 2014 Posted January 29, 2014 Disk to disk copies we used a pirating program, we even had a crack program from somewhere that used to copy disks with the harddrive disconnected from the computer so no anti piracy stuff stopped it, you just loaded the program into the disk drive, unplugged the disk drive then kept swapping disks till it stopped, a mate also made a tapedrive to tapedrive copy cable My parents nearly brought a ZX-81 Spectrum as our first computer but I had already used an Apple2E so said no and we got the VIC20 instead, 3.5kb of memory was awesome.
ChianasGeek Posted January 30, 2014 Posted January 30, 2014 Windows and the Mac are far better GUI desktops/workstations than any free thing for example, and that's unlikely to change any time soon. X11 is really just.. terrible. I still would rather be able to go back to KDE 3.5 than any other GUI I've ever used!
Halstrom Posted January 30, 2014 Posted January 30, 2014 Exciting Technology. Cool, didn't realise it was Kirk endorsed Brings back memories of in the 80's when Commodore 64's were for sale in the department stores, writing quick basic programs that said "Press any key except "g"" and then the program would put the key pressed on the screen, if they pressed "g" it printed on the screen something like: "GLOBAL DELETE of K-Mart Australia's main database confirmed, deleting all files in 10 seconds" with a countdown. We'd program that in then hang around for an hour or so watching people play with the computer them call for staff help or scamper away after hitting G
RitualClarity Posted January 30, 2014 Posted January 30, 2014 Everything is better with Capt'n Kirk... I was too impatient to really work with the programing. I did however get the thing to be able to access the program by using the various run commands and such. Type a few lines in here. Wait 5 minutes.. then get results... boring. I just play Jupiter Lander
Halstrom Posted January 30, 2014 Posted January 30, 2014 Awesome, I remember that game, I think I had it on Cartridge
prideslayer Posted February 1, 2014 Author Posted February 1, 2014 With the comment on FreeBSD and ports. I understood that BSD has an Linux emulation layer that is quite good depending on the kernel that is needed. Are you stating that there are "full ports" of Cent-OS, Fedora etc that run from BSD itself or do they use the emulation layer? They are one and the same thing. The CentOS port for example is the freebsd linux emulation kernel module (which translates system calls) with a full (minimal) install of the CentOS binaries into a 'jail'. Binaries for linux, like acrobat reader, run chroot'd in that jail, so / is the jail root, /bin/ is the real CentOS /bin/, and so on.
RitualClarity Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 Oh, now I understand. I didn't understand the "jail" part of what I was reading... Still a little confused but believe it is a protected section of the OS where programs can run and interact in a "limited" fashion with the rest of the OS and user data without affecting the "core" or main parts of the OS. This emulation Kernel module would be far superior to windows emulation programs because of the low level it is accessing the OS. The Kernel Modules as opposed to being a program level that is. Windows has too much junk between it (emulation) and the kernel. Because if this lower level access the programs can run in 'near' real time and be more stable as well. This alien has been reading since the last time you posted... lol. I also read that you can run/install BSD right from the internet using the source code and even if you want to limit or change the 'jails' to create a more secure BSD system that it was to begin with. Of course you would need to know more than I currently do to be safe. .. Once I get off my green but and fix/reassemble my computers that I have I just might run a BSD on one from the internet and some commands. I found that many of the forums there are about as nice as LL is with getting info and the way the give that info is also easier to understand as well. If I can figure this out I can have both BSD and Linux running on the same box with little loss or difficulty. Best of both worlds so to say. I am sure if I desired I could even run an XP or 7 on it as well as a spare OS for emergencies. Like what caused you to create this thread in the first place. Right now I don't have that. The only limitation I would have would be any programs that rely heavily DirectX . The spare XP or 7 would be good on that computer because I can create snapshots of the OS either directly (XP) or the entire system itself. Then can return to a previous point after finishing the work I wanted to do. Nothing really saved. Ah dreams and aspirations. ...
prideslayer Posted February 2, 2014 Author Posted February 2, 2014 Oh, now I understand. I didn't understand the "jail" part of what I was reading... Still a little confused but believe it is a protected section of the OS where programs can run and interact in a "limited" fashion with the rest of the OS and user data without affecting the "core" or main parts of the OS. This emulation Kernel module would be far superior to windows emulation programs because of the low level it is accessing the OS. The Kernel Modules as opposed to being a program level that is. Windows has too much junk between it (emulation) and the kernel. Because if this lower level access the programs can run in 'near' real time and be more stable as well. A "jail" in FreeBSD is a "chroot" environment. So the program might be in /usr/local/linux/bin and chrooted to /usr/local/linux. When the program looks at "/" it is actually seeing "/usr/local/linux/". You can also give a jail a different hostname and IP address. A shell script run in the example above using /bin/sh would actually be using /usr/local/linux/bin/sh and any other commands it runs would also be inside the jail. This is separate from the emulation which is really just a simple translation layer that changes the system calls the program makes to the equivalent ones in the BSD kernel. Both are used together. This alien has been reading since the last time you posted... lol. I also read that you can run/install BSD right from the internet using the source code and even if you want to limit or change the 'jails' to create a more secure BSD system that it was to begin with. Of course you would need to know more than I currently do to be safe. .. Once I get off my green but and fix/reassemble my computers that I have I just might run a BSD on one from the internet and some commands. I found that many of the forums there are about as nice as LL is with getting info and the way the give that info is also easier to understand as well. I haven't ever actually used the jails for anything beyond the linux emulation stuff. They are interesting, but I've been using virtualized systems for so long that I haven't had a need for them. A spare system running VMWare is an excellent way to learn. The ESXi hypervisor is free, it's just the fancy enterprise stuff that costs money. If I can figure this out I can have both BSD and Linux running on the same box with little loss or difficulty. Best of both worlds so to say. I am sure if I desired I could even run an XP or 7 on it as well as a spare OS for emergencies. Like what caused you to create this thread in the first place. Right now I don't have that. The only limitation I would have would be any programs that rely heavily DirectX . The spare XP or 7 would be good on that computer because I can create snapshots of the OS either directly (XP) or the entire system itself. Then can return to a previous point after finishing the work I wanted to do. Nothing really saved. Ah dreams and aspirations. ... You can do exactly that with ESX. You install it to the machine, and then connect to it from your regular desktop with the java client or in your browser. From there you create VMs by assigning them disk space, memory, CPUs, etc and just boot and install OSes to them as if they were real computers; they even have BIOS you can enter, should you need to. Once the OS is installed you can connect to it with the remote console, or via whatever other methods you'd normally use; e.g. SSH for *nix, RDP for Windows, etc. I've been using VMWare for a *long* time, it's really just plain magic. The knockoffs (Xen, HyperV, virtualbox, etc) the past few years still aren't even close. If you don't have a spare computer to run the hypervisor on, there is always VMWare Workstation. I use this as well, it's basically the same thing, but it's all done in a windows application rather than on a dedicated computer. Workstation isn't free, but there's a trial, and it's inexpensive.. $100 or less last time I bought it. VMWare Player, a watered down version of workstation, is free for non commercial use.
prideslayer Posted February 2, 2014 Author Posted February 2, 2014 For demo purposes. Not mine, just a screenshot I found. That's vmware workstation. The little boxes are VMs running other OSes that are also listed on the left. Only two of the VMs are powered on.
Mashi Posted February 2, 2014 Posted February 2, 2014 You would have been fine running a single strip of two 500GB SSD's instead of considering 4 drives in a 10 setup, with mechanical drives for your redundancy. That's what I use, especially at the price/performance cost ratio. SSD's have already hit the maximum realworld r/w limit on SATA3, and anything beyond 2 or 3 drives is really overkill. And not to forget we're in a "chip shortage" for SSD's, flashdrives, etc. If you didn't buy a SSD a year ago, you're looking at price hurt. It was down as low as $0.34/GB last year, now if you're lucky you can find it as low as 0.70/GB but genearly it's in the 0.80 range. But really, in terms of "quality of drives" and all that stuff. There was a test article on /. a few days ago on reliability, and the top two failures were Seagate and WD, with the highest performers being Samsung(if you can find them) and Toshiba. You'll probably find this interesting for performance in a 0 setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPuywNBctvg#t=0 I really do miss the old days when there were dozens of companies out there. Back when I was young and was looking for what to do in the world, I worked at a rather large shop. We'd get in crates of factory sealed drives(500 units), and they'd be dead or already starting systemic cluster failure; where drive clusters fail, are re-written, and fail until the entire drive is marked bad. Want to guess the company? Seagate. I've only started using the drives both at home, including in my media and NAS in the last couple of years. WD, I've got 3 drives in my gaming PC, had one drive die within a year, the RMA replacement is starting to show cluster failure and I/O write errors that's 6mo old so about time for another replacement. And backup software is seriously hit or miss, after running into so many issues with Norton, I wanted to light it on fire. And sadly I'm old enough to remember when Norton was kickass software in the 90's, and Norton Commander could do *anything*. The last 5 years or so I've gone with Acronis True image. Hell of a lot better. Plus it supports pretty much all the other backup formats on the market, so if you have existing hardbackups on/offsite you can pull it up.
prideslayer Posted February 2, 2014 Author Posted February 2, 2014 You would have been fine running a single strip of two 500GB SSD's instead of considering 4 drives in a 10 setup, with mechanical drives for your redundancy. 2x500 isn't enough space, and I simply won't risk a RAID0/stripe as the main array on my workstation. It's fine for the scratch/download area, but again, this isn't just a PC I game and fool around on -- it's my job. If a drive dies, I can't afford an hour of downtime waiting for a replacement to get shipped out, never mind several days. I'm not sure what you mean by using mechanical drives for redundancy, do you mean for backups? They aren't the same thing. But really, in terms of "quality of drives" and all that stuff. There was a test article on /. a few days ago on reliability, and the top two failures were Seagate and WD, with the highest performers being Samsung(if you can find them) and Toshiba. Was this the blackblaze drive failure report? I saw that and I'm a bit skeptical of the relevance of their data in more normal use cases. Google's report from a few years back, and the CERN data integrity study were both more enlightening I think. The CERN one in particular was illuminating in ways most of the sites that reviewed it did not cover -- e.g. the # of errors they had was higher than you'd expect when comparing total errors vs. total space read/written, however, all the errors were concentrated on 100 of the 3000 nodes they tested on, and 80% of those errors were apparently due to a problem with the WD firmware. You'll probably find this interesting for performance in a 0 setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPuywNBctvg#t=0 This is a well known phenomenon. A 2-drive RAID0 has been the best "bang for the buck" for a long time. I'm not using the onboard SATA (except for my BD), I put a real RAID card w/ battery backup in when this fiasco unfolded. I can't run either of the tests from the video to compare since PCMark is payware and the other thing is for Macs. HDTune shows performance as expected though; I really do miss the old days when there were dozens of companies out there. Back when I was young and was looking for what to do in the world, I worked at a rather large shop. We'd get in crates of factory sealed drives(500 units), and they'd be dead or already starting systemic cluster failure; where drive clusters fail, are re-written, and fail until the entire drive is marked bad. Want to guess the company? Seagate. I've only started using the drives both at home, including in my media and NAS in the last couple of years. WD, I've got 3 drives in my gaming PC, had one drive die within a year, the RMA replacement is starting to show cluster failure and I/O write errors that's 6mo old so about time for another replacement. Everyone has similar stories from every manufacturer. I've gone through all the brands, and Seagate and IBM have been the most reliable for me over the years. I have just over 20 seagate drives at home right now. 4 in my workstation, 6 in my server, 2 in my HTPC, 2 in external USB enclosures, 5 in a SCSI backplane, and 3 on the shelf. Only two have failed and both of the failures are 5+ years old. The FC SAN at the office has 48x 2TB Seagate drives (24 SATA, 24 nearline SAS), about 2 years old. One of the SAS drives failed about a year in. And backup software is seriously hit or miss, after running into so many issues with Norton, I wanted to light it on fire. And sadly I'm old enough to remember when Norton was kickass software in the 90's, and Norton Commander could do *anything*. The last 5 years or so I've gone with Acronis True image. Hell of a lot better. Plus it supports pretty much all the other backup formats on the market, so if you have existing hardbackups on/offsite you can pull it up. I have a love/hate with Norton. Norton Commander was awesome, absolutely. Ghost has likewise always been awesome, I used it extensively to do network imaging (and reimaging) over the years, and it's what I was using for backups up until this fiasco. It worked perfectly -- the problem was entirely user error. I've replaced it now with Symantec System Recovery (Ghost has been retired), which has a 64bit recovery ISO so I don't have to hunt around for 32bit drivers to make a custom recovery image. The hate side comes in with their other products. Their AV suite used to be second to none, but now it's just bloated crap. Same with all their products in that family (360, Internet Security, etc). I've heard good things about Acronis as well, but Ghost/SSR do a great job for personal use. For the office servers, I've thrown basically everything out the window, and reverted to the oldschool backup method -- cron jobs running rsync and DB dumps. The integrated backup solutions for vmware are all just terrible, even the ones costing thousands of dollars. I'm looking at you, Symantec Backup Exec and Veeam.
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