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106 lines
8.6 KiB
Plaintext
106 lines
8.6 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1673
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Title: HPR1673: How I use ZFS on Linux
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1673/hpr1673.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:45:44
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---
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This is HPR episode 1673 entitled How I Use CFS on Linux and is part of the series file systems.
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It is hosted by first-time host Mitchell Sierishinsky-Aka, Mindbender and is about 17 minutes long.
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The summary is the CFS file system and how I use it under Linux.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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That's HPR15.
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Better web hosting that's honest and fair at an honesthost.com.
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Hey everybody, this is Michael, aka Mindbender.
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Recording my first podcast for Hacker Public Radio.
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I wanted to speak to you guys a little bit about some of the things that I'm into.
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I've been using Linux often on for the last 10 years or so.
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I started out with Fedora Core 2 way back in the day and honestly at the time I had very little
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knowledge base about Linux in general.
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However, since that time I've used it on a number of devices actually put together a few servers
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that I've used for storing files around my house.
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What I want to speak to you guys today about is something that I know has already been
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discussed on the Hacker Public Radio is the CFS file system.
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It is a very powerful and as they say the last word in file systems,
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very powerful tool that we have in the open source community.
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Now, CFS has been around for a number of years at this point and is very stable file system.
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But it originates mostly from Sun Microsystems now Oracle originally used in the Solaris
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Operating System was ported over to the BSDs and honestly I feel that it is the BSDs killer feature.
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Licensing makes it a bit of an issue. It's released under a open source but license but it's not
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compatible with the GPL that Linux is. So unfortunately it has never been compiled into Linux itself.
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But it can be used in various ways with Linux. Two ways I'd know of is the fuse file system
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which I'm honestly not that knowledgeable about because I've never used this method.
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I've been told it might be slower if anybody else wants to come in on that please do.
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But also there is also a project known as the ZFS on Linux project.
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Now more information about this project can be found at ZFS on Linux.org.
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As I say on their main website it's a native Linux kernel port of the ZFS file system so it
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actually works at the kernel level. And they have pre-compiled binaries as well as
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various as well as repositories for a number of distributions. Looking on their website right now
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I see of course Debian Ubuntu, Fedora being three of them but also Arch Linux, Sabayon
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and as well as Rell and CentOS. It is now been reported to be stable on Linux the ZFS
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on Linux port is stable and Linux and is felt to be ready to use in a production environment.
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I have been using ZFS on Linux for approximately one and a half years on my own home server.
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Originally it was a Debian 7.0 based server that I was running the XFCE desktop environment on.
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However I recently have switched over to Ubuntu 14.04 mainly because it's a long-term support
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release as well as it seems to work very well under the Mate desktop which is of course a
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re-implementation of the GNOME 2.0 series of desktop environments and whenever I first started putting
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together a server back in the day. I think it was in the Ubuntu 10 era that it originally used
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GNOME 2. So it has worked very well thus far. I'm using like said Ubuntu 14.04 with the
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Mate desktop. It is not the recent re-spin that was put out with Ubuntu 14.04 with Mate I added
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the repositories separately. However it seems to work very well the way I've put it together
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haven't had any issues with updating or anything like that. ZFS is I do feel the final say in file
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systems. It is robust. It has copy on right protection. It basically treats multiple discs as
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one large pool so the nice thing about that is if you have you can set it to be basically for
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high fault tolerance if you lose one disc assuming that you've done it correctly you will still have
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a file system and going through commands using command line you can actually remove the faulted
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disc and put it back and put a new disc in its place. You can set it up to be similar to
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RAID 5 or even RAID 6. So basically you can lose one disc or two discs and you've still got
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a working file system. Now the one thing to keep in mind is that ZFS is not a substitute for a backup.
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While it does have snapshotting which I forgot to mention earlier which basically means that it
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will be able to make a snapshot in time of your file system and you can go back and retrieve files
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that may have been deleted. These are not backups. There is still nothing that can replace a backup
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let's say to another computer to a USB drive or even to something like crash plan which is an
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online backup system that is compatible with Linux as well as other operating systems including
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Windows and OS X. There are even some guides on certain distros that show you how to make it your
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root file system. Now on my server my root file system is still EXT4 and I use the ZFS as
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sort of the area to store audio files, video files, family pictures and things like that.
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Before the brave ones among you out there who would like to try something like that I believe
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that Arch Linux actually has a guide on their website to show you how to do that.
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Now out in BSD land there are ways to and I think that there actually is a natively supported
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file system so it is supported that you can install that to a root partition and use that as
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your main file system. Now I have had a few problems with the ZFS and I should restate that it's
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actually not a problem with the ZFS it's problems with certain hard drives. My current server setup
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is 5, 3 terabyte hard drives set with a fault tolerance of 1. So basically I can lose 1 drive
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and maintain the ZFS pool. Now I ran into an issue where I lost 2 drives at one time and therefore
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my ZFS pool was gone. I was not able to use it. Luckily I had all my files backed up
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on another computer and didn't have to worry about that. However it is something to keep in mind.
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One idea if someone is going to put together a pool such as this, a ZFS pool is to get
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drives from different batches. So basically I think it's a bad idea to buy all your drives at one
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time. It might be a better idea to get them from various places, Amazon, NewA, Tiger Direct
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or even a local business if you're lucky to have one nearby that would be able to sell you a
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driver to and you'll probably have better luck than I had with that setup. Now I don't want to
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jump on one drive for being more reliable than another drive or company be more reliable than
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another drive or another company as far as hard drive manufacturing goes. However there is a
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website called Backblaze, B-A-C-K-B-L-A-Z-E.com who they run a multitude of servers in their company
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and they actually did a drive life study inside their company and the results can basically be
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found out on their website which I will place in the show notes might be something to think about
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when you purchase a hard drive for your for your rig. So I just wanted to let everyone know
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about the ZFS file system. I know it's been discussed before on Hacker Public Radio.
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Keep in mind this is my first podcast that I've ever recorded so I'm hoping to do some more
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in the future and I've thought since I do listen to quite a few HPR episodes that I might as
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well contribute as well. And also before I go I just wanted to thank JWP who did a ZFS file system
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podcast on Hacker Public Radio's HPR number 1600 on September 19, 2014. He had some very good
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information about the ZFS file system and especially about reasons why it is not included by default
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in Linux related to its licensing issues and he has a very good handle on that. So I recommend
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you to go back and listen to that podcast as well. Once again thank you very much. Look forward to
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doing something like this again in the future.
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You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org. We are a community
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podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our
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shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast
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then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was
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revolution at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show please email the host directly,
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leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status,
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today's show is released on the creative comments, attribution, share a light 3.0 license.
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