Last week’s episode was called on account of covid. My brain is only lightly friend today, so here’s a bit of OpenZFS Mastery.
Storage is a sysadmin’s natural enemy.
You might think it’s management, but some folks touch computers for fun. Similarly, not all sysadmins have users other than themselves. Most computer hardware is fairly robust, barring encounters with free-range pile drivers. CPUs and memory rarely catch fire. Packets go missing? No biggie, just retransmit. But no matter how big your system or how many users it has or who you answer to, storage is an unending annoyance.
A computer’s filesystem dictates much of its performance and behavior. We rebuild entire systems because a major filesystem was configured incorrectly, or the filesystem chosen wasn’t suitable for the task, or because subtle filesystem corruption infiltrated our data and we can’t trust even the basic programs shipped with the operating system.
OpenZFS on Linux is best described as a “trip.” No, not a journey, a fall.