woork: Digg-like navigation bar using CSS – Add this to my collection of pretty rounded menu bars.
Tags: css digg menubar
HTML Purifier – Filter your HTML the standards-compliant way! – Makes some big claims, would be interesting to see it put to the test.
Tags: html php htmlpurifier filter xss
zfs – Trac – Source and binaries for ZFS on Mac OS X. Seems safe to say that we’ll see ZFS as a built in feature in some future release of OS X (10.6 perhaps?).
Tags: zfs macosx filesystem
woork: Digg-like navigation bar using CSS – Add this to my collection of pretty rounded menu bars.
Tags: css digg menubar
HTML Purifier – Filter your HTML the standards-compliant way! – Makes some big claims, would be interesting to see it put to the test.
Tags: html php htmlpurifier filter xss
zfs – Trac – Source and binaries for ZFS on Mac OS X. Seems safe to say that we’ll see ZFS as a built in feature in some future release of OS X (10.6 perhaps?).
Tags: zfs macosx filesystem
Google Mac Engineering Manager Amit Singh announced a port of FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to Mac OS X: MacFUSE.
It would be really great if Apple would integrate into this OS X. It has a BSD license so that shouldn’t prevent them from using it. Making it work with the Finder would be helpful though.
Jeff Bonwick pointed out that ZFS is going to be ported to FUSE (filesystem in user space). This is being done as part of the Google Summer of Code by Ricardo Manuel da Silva Correia.
For more info check out the Google SoC application and the ZFS on FUSE/Linux Blog. Although this project specifically mentions FUSE on Linux I hope that it will work with FUSE for FreeBSD.
I don’t know what sort of performance penalty is involved with FUSE, but it would be darn cool to have this work with FreeBSD.
Late last month there was a post on the zfs-discuss email list indicating that Apple may be porting ZFS to Mac OS X. Having read some of docs on ZFS this seems like a great idea. With the ability to easily purchase an Xserve RAID unit up to 7TB, having advanced file system abilities would be a major plus.
A fully loaded Xserve RAID unit runs just over $17k for 7TB. To hit that they use 14 500GB drives. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to see them using the new Seagate 750GB drive (or something like it) in the future. Using 14 of those would put you at 10.5TB. Given the announced retail price of about $560 for these drives I’d guess that prices for such an Xserve RAID unit could come in around $21k.
There is one more piece to this puzzle that would be really great, an easy to use graphical UI for managing ZFS on OS X. This would be in addition to the CLI tools, not a replacement. So I’m going to wish upon a star for the Apple triple play: ZFS on OS X, a 10TB (or higher) Xserve RAID unit and simple easy to use graphical UI for managing ZFS. And since I have nothing else to do, I’ll predict that this will happen with in the next 12 to 18 months.
It really is amazing how easy it is to put together a system with a terabyte (or more) of storage. For less than $500 you can purchase four Maxtor 300 Gigabyte IDE drives ($118 each from New Egg), putting you well over one terabyte in capacity. If you are looking for something a bit bigger Apple has made that pretty easy with their Xserve RAID unit, up to 7 terabytes for $13,000. I believe hard drive capacity will continue to go up and price per terabyte will drop.
At work I’ve got few systems now with a terabyte or more of storage. While most modern operating systems support filesystems in the terabyte range, their advanced features don’t seem to work well. FreeBSD had no problem running with a terabyte plus filesystem (fs), but snapshots on that fs were pretty much useless because they took forever. Still having to run fsck when problems happen would undoubtedly be equally as painful. Fortunately there has been talk of adding journaling to FreeBSD, hopefully that work will at least take care of the fsck problem. General work on large file systems under FreeBSD is being done as part of project Big Disk.
You might think that a company with more money than many countries (Microsoft) would be able to produce an OS (Windows 2003 Server) that wouldn’t have those sorts of issues, but you’d be wrong. Windows 2003 does fine using a one terabyte plus fs, until want to use things like Shadow Copy and then things start to fall apart rather quickly. From what I’ve been able to determine things work fine for awhile and then shadow copy stops working at some point after the system has been up for awhile. That wouldn’t be so bad if that was the only thing that went wrong, but it isn’t. In Windows 2003 the built in backup software makes use of shadow copy, which makes sense, if shadow copy didn’t roll over and die on large file systems. When ntbackup tries to create a shadow copy and that fails, ntbackup stops and the whole back up fails. Obviously that makes it rather difficult to get a clean backup, at least using ntbackup. But it gets even worse, when ntbackup fails because shadow copy fails it erases all of the old successful snapshots that shadow copy made earlier.
After hunting around for awhile I came across Article 833167 at support.microsoft.com claiming that there is a hotfix that is supposed to fix the problem, but it isn’t publicly available. I have to contact Microsoft support and request the hotfix, after which they’ll determine if they are going to charge me for said support. At some point I’ll have to bite the bullet and ask for the hotfix, but I get the feeling they don’t have a lot of confidence in it yet. How long until SP2 for Windows 2003 comes out? What ever it is I doubt that I can wait that long.
Given how easy and cheap it is to equip a system with a terabyte (or more) of hard drive space it is disappointing that some things don’t work better on that sort of scale.