I was playing around with ZFS root a week or two back, and wanted to be able to create the ZFS root pool and associated file systems (dump device, swap, /var) through jumpstart. To install to a ZFS root pool, you can add the “pool” directive to your client profile: pool rpool auto 4g 4g [...]
One of the nice features of ZFS is the ability to take file system snapshots, which you can then use to recover perviously deleted data. In recent opensolaris and Nevada builds, there are several auto-snapshot services that can be used to schedule hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshots: $ svcs -a | grep auto-snapshot disabled [...]
ZFS allows quotas to be defined for each file system, but currently lacks the ability to define user and group quotas inside a file system (you can create one file system per user to get around this). This issue is being addressed, and user and group quotas will soon be part of opensolaris. Here is [...]
Ben Rockwood is awesome. If you haven’t had a chance to check out his blog, its a must read for any Solaris Admin. He gave a presentation at the Open Storage Summit about ZFS. (Video Here) Its worth the read / view for some indepth ZFS concepts. Joerg assisted in turning some of this [...]
A few chapters of the upcoming OpenSolaris Bible have been released. Specifically, looking through chapter 8 on ZFS, I came across this handy list of properties and their descriptions. File System Properties aclinherit– Inheritance of ACL entries aclmode– Modification of ACLs in a chmod(2) operation atime– Whether access times of files are updated when read [...]
ZFS uses the ZFS intent log (also referred to as a ZIL) to store synchronous writes. This has the advantage that a full transaction group doesn’t need to be written when a synchronous write occurs, and maximizes the use of I/O bandwidth. For some applications (databases come to mind), placing the ZIL on a dedicated [...]
