[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 09:06:13AM -0400, Mark Brown wrote:
> Agreed Linux is fine as a general purpose server, but without a
> filesystem like ZFS, it's still in the dark ages.

The lack of a zfsdump is a significant problem, however.  Snapshotting
is not a viable alternative in some environments/for some applications,
neither is the use of userspace code such as tar/gtar.  I have attempted
to start a conversation between folks working on dump/ufsdump in the
BSD, Linux and (Open)Solaris environments, and need to follow up on
that.  (The best comment thus far came from the fellow who has done
the heavy lifting on the Linux version; he pointed out that dump's
design dates from the days of 9-track tapes and perhaps a full rework
is in order.  I think he's right, although I haven't spent significant
time inside the code since about '85 or so.)

And let me toss in a plug here for OpenBSD, my OS of choice.  It has
a sensible -- that is, *minimal* -- installer, it runs well on old
hardware, and the releases come out like clockwork.

---Rsk