[geeks] Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris bits to be in next version of OSX

[Mike Meredith]

On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 02:58:54 -0500 (CDT), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> When I last looked at and used ZFS a couple months ago, documentation
> ranged from scant to non-existant.  Man pages didn't seem to explain
> anything like that.

I guess pre-release software isn't as well documented as it could be.
Certainly I found it within the manual pages within a day or two of
getting zfs live on my workstation.

> 
> > You haven't read the documentation have you ? Whilst by default zfs
> > filesystems are not handled through /etc/vfstab, they can be.
> 
> Why shouldn't they be, by default, where all the other filesystems
> are? You don't use the 'nfs' command to mount remote volumes, or the

Whilst I can see the virtue of managing them through vfstab (not least
because Networker will see the filesystems although it has other
problems with ZFS), I can see why it isn't done by default. It's easy on
a badly managed system for vfstab to get out of sync with what's
actually on disk ... I've seen this sort of chaos (not on a system *I*
managed!) and I dare say Sun sees quite a bit of this too.

> > As for complexity, managing storage through zpool/zfs is easier than
> > :-
> > * AIX volume groups/logical volumes.
> 
> Hahahahahahaha.  No.  mkvg/mklv/mkfs, and there you go.  Yes it's
> three commands, but they're sensibly delineated by abstraction. 

I'm familiar with AIX disk management commands and they're certainly a
lot better than DiskSuite, but I'd still say zpool/zfs are easier. And
'sensibly delineated by abstraction' from the management viewpoint
(ignoring any under the hood cheating that may be going on ... probably
for good reasons).

> All that and smitty makes smc look like the slow bloated pig that it
> is.

Well yes. Anyone at Sun listening ? Get yourself an AIX box and have a
look at SMIT. And an option to say 'forget about the graphical stuff
just give me a text interface' (smitty) is *very* useful for remote
management.