I've just subscribed to this list after Alec's posting and reading the comments in the archive and I have a couple of comments:
Mike Gerdts: While NFS4 holds some promise here, it is not a solution today. It won't be until all OS's that came out before 2008 are gone. That will be a while. Well, seeing as only a few days ago I put the last of our SPARCstation 1s into the recycle pile and have in daily use a DEC Alphastation (circa 1996) running Digital UNIX 4.2C, which the new server will need to support, and that I've just managed to migrate the last machine off Solaris 7 (I still have many-many machines on Solaris 8) I can see it being at least a decade until all the machines we have being at a level to handle NFSv4. From your analysis it does look like UFS is the only way to go presantly. However, this is likely to mean that I'm tied to UFS for the lifetime of the server, which is probably in the 7-10 year timescale. Brian H. Nelson: I'm sure it would be interesting for those on the list if you could outline the gotchas so that the rest of us don't have to re-invent the wheel... or at least not fall down the pitfalls. Nicolas Williams: Unfortunately for us at the coal face it's very rare that we can do the ideal thing. Quotas are part of the problem but the main problem is that there is currently no way over overcoming the interoperability problems using the toolset offered by ZFS. One way around this for NFSv2/3 clients would be if the ZFS NFS server could "consolidate" a tree of filesystems so that to the clients it looks like one filesystem. From the outside the development group this seems like the 90% solution which would probably take less engineering effort than the full implementation of a user quota system. I'm not sure why the OS (outside the ZFS subsystem) would need to know that the directory tree it's seeing is composed of separate "filesystems" and is not just one big filesystem. (Unless, of course, there are tape archival programs which require to save and recreate ZFS sub-filesystems.) It would also have the added benefit of making df(1) usable again. ;-) Believe me when I say that I'd love to use ZFS and would love to be able to recommend it to everyone as, other than this particular set of problems, it seems such a great system. My posting on Slashdot was the culmination of frustration and disappointment after a number of days trying every trick I could think of to get it working and failing. Steve -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Systems Administrator, E-Mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Earth Sciences, Tel:- +44 (0)1865 282110 University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, UK. Fax:- +44 (0)1865 272072 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
