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Apple Removes Nearly All Reference To ZFS
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Jun 10, 2009 01:15 AM
from the you-say-technology-i-say-politics dept.
from the you-say-technology-i-say-politics dept.
Roskolnikov writes "Apple has apparently decided that ZFS isn't really ready for prime time. We've been discussing Apple/ZFS rumors, denials, and sightings for some years now. Currently a search on Apple's site for ZFS yields only two hits, one of them probably an oversight in the ZFS-cleansing program and the other a reference to open source. Contrast this with an item from the Google cache regarding ZFS and Snow Leopard. Apple has done this kind of disappearing act in the past, but I was really hoping that this was one feature promise they would keep. I certainly hope this isn't the first foot in the grave for ZFS on OS X."
Related Stories
[+]
Apple: Sun CEO Says ZFS Will Be 'the File System' for OSX 384 comments
Fjan11 writes "Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Apple will be making ZFS 'the file system' in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. It's possible that Leopard's Time Machine feature will require ZFS to run, because ZFS has back-up and snapshots build right in to the filesystem as well as a host of other features. 'Rumors of Apple's interest in ZFS began in April 2006, when an OpenSolaris mailing list revealed that Apple had contacted Sun regarding porting ZFS to OS 10. The file system later began making appearances in Leopard builds. ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+.'"
[+]
Apple: Apple Confirms No (Default) ZFS In Leopard 362 comments
javipas writes "Despite recent rumors about the possible inclusion of ZFS as the filesystem of choice for MacOS X 10.5 'Leopard', an Apple executive has denied this possibility. Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS has as much as said 'ZFS is not happening ... Croll declined to comment on statements made last week by Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who said the use of ZFS would be announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard. A representative with Sun did not have any immediate comment.' Users of the future operating system will have to keep working with HFS+, a filesystem that is almost ten years old now." Update: 06/12 19:57 GMT by KD : An Apple spokesman contacted InformationWeek with a correction, which they ran as a comment on their original story: What Apple meant to say was, "ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system."
[+]
ZFS Confirmed In Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard 178 comments
number655321 writes "Apple has confirmed the inclusion of ZFS in the forthcoming OS X Server Snow Leopard. From Apple's site: 'For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots.' CTO of Storage Technologies at Sun Microsystems, Jeff Bonwick, is hosting a discussion on his blog. What does this mean for the 'client' version of OS X Snow Leopard?"
[+]
Apple: Apple Discontinues ZFS Project 329 comments
Zaurus writes "Apple has replaced its ZFS project page with a notice that 'The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.' Apple originally touted ZFS as a feature that would be available in Snow Leopard Server. A few months before release, all mention of ZFS was removed from the Apple web site and literature, and ZFS was notably absent from Snow Leopard Server at launch. Despite repeated attempts to get clarification about their plans from ZFS, Apple has not made any official statement regarding the matter. A zfs-macos Google group has been set up for members of Apple's zfs-discuss mailing list to migrate to, as many people had started using the unfinished ZFS port already. The call is out for developers who can continue the forked project."
Daring Fireball suggests that Apple's decision could have been motivated by NetApp's patent lawsuit over ZFS.
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Well fuck it, we're going to 128 bits (Score:5, Insightful)
cross-meme joke completed.
Larry effect again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this be a Larry effect?
Re:Larry effect again? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm thinking Balki effect.
Parent
Re:Larry effect again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO. Oracle just recently purchased Sun (makers of ZFS), so the OP is postulating whether Apple pulling ZFS is a product of Cisco not working on/opening up ZFS to Apple like Sun did.
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Re:Larry effect again? (Score:5, Informative)
It's widely known that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are good friends, see this from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison [wikipedia.org]
"On 18 December 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. His friend Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc's CEO, was the official wedding photographer."
So, no, Larry's company becoming ZFS owner ain't the reason Steve's company would drop it.
Parent
Re:Larry effect again? (Score:5, Funny)
One
Raging
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison
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Re:Larry effect again? (Score:5, Funny)
No, Google "2 CEOs, 1 filesystem".
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mod parent up (Score:5, Funny)
tequila really burns when it comes out your nose.
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Death knell (Score:3, Insightful)
I certainly hope this isn't the first foot in the grave for ZFS on OSX.
More like the last nail in the coffin . . .
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What ZFS does have that typical Apple Consumers would like to see it on desktops and not just on servers?
Almost every ZFS oriented discussion, there just comes one point up. ZFS is not miracle what is not possible to gain already with other kind setup with RAID and other filesystem.
Re:Death knell (Score:5, Informative)
What ZFS does have that typical Apple Consumers would like to see it on desktops
Pretty much all of it applies equally to consumer systems.
ZFS is not miracle what is not possible to gain already with other kind setup with RAID and other filesystem
You need to study ZFS more, [opensolaris.org] as you clearly know little about it. Almost no RAID systems can do what ZFS does. Hints: end to end checksumming; self-healing; copy on write; ...
Hint: The extra capability largely comes from integrating both the "filesystem" and "volume manager" layers, which are separate modules in traditional configurations. Calling ZFS a "filesystem" seems to mislead a lot of people that it can be compared to other "filesystems"; and the fact that ZFS implements RAID-like redundancy leads people to think that it can be compared to other "RAID" systems. Sure, it can be compared, but conventional systems will generally lose (notably in data integrity, but also in performance, manageability, etc).
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Parent Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Shame I just blew my mod points by posting.
But parent is completely wrong. ZFS root/boot is fully supported by Sun, and ZFS itself is used in production in thousands of installations.
Parent
Re:Death knell (Score:5, Interesting)
More like the last nail in the coffin . . .
Which is what I hope. Having tried forth and back over the last years, trying to convince myself, that it would fulfill its promises (and it promises a lot! and all beautiful things) one day or another.
It simply didn't. Which is a shame, since if it did, ZFS would be last file system mankind would have ever needed.
But even in 2009, it suffers from serious problems, just read the ZFS list in OpenSolaris. Basic things, that is.
Like boot corruption; like unusable system, if you pull the power, and pull the power again while it is restarting; Like slowness under specific conditions; like rendering the file system unbootable, reproducibly, when using a specific setup of snapshots.
The latter, not addressed on the mailing list, killed our interest immediately.
Not to forget some arrogance of the Sun engineers when it turned out that you cannot simply unplug a USB-drive. And it won't be enough, to umount it, neither. If you want the data to be there, sure, after the removal, you have to export the drive. Now tell this to Aunt Tilly. Or me, when I stumble over a USB-cable and out it is. And my data, as confirmed on the mailing list, potentially gone forever; with, confirmed, no tool available for recovery.
My last hope for it, had been that the engineers at Apple were able to give it the life-line needed to provide reliable Time-Machines (the snapshots of ZFS are just perfect therefore), but obviously, they have given up just as well.
I bet that something like ZFS will resurrect, one day or another. It simply has to. But ZFS as of today is more like Leonardo's drawings of a copter, compared to an Apache.
Parent
Re:Death knell (Score:5, Insightful)
The data loss and corruption that the parent is talking about is the fault of crap hardware. In almost every case, USB is involved, or more rarely the lack of ECC ram. It is true that ZFS is less tolerant of bad hardware.
What good is a fault tolerant file system if it isn't tolerant of faults?
With such hardware, it is impossible for any filesystem to function reliably.
Quite incorrect.
USB and Firewire bridges are notorious for this. If you care about your data, you should run the other way if you happen upon one.
Well, golly, those only happen to be the way 99.999% of Apple's customers attach exernal drives, not to mention 99.9% of all of the rest of the world.
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Re:Death knell (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Death knell (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been following the zfs-discuss list for years, and almost no one has lost data.
That's not good enough for the likes like me.
For the rest of your post, I am simply too lazy to prove you wrong. For a beer each I could fiddle out those that were confirmed to lead to data loss, including unrecoverable data loss, as I mentioned in my post.
But I won't do this (except for that beer each), because you know that best yourself:
The data loss and corruption that the parent is talking about is the fault of crap hardware. In almost every case, USB is involved, or more rarely the lack of ECC ram
Because this is exactly, word for word, the usual excuse given in the mailing list.
And I didn't add the one in my original post, when it was 'confirmed' that you need RAID if your data are valuable to you; and now, read this in bold: irrespective of hardware failure. I for one accept the need for RAID, in case of a hard disk really and effectively dying. Not for manhandling the data. Read the postings carefully.
Of course, the other person answering your flawed arguments about 'crap hardware' is right to the point: What good is a fault tolerant file system if it isn't tolerant of faults?
May I remind you, the premise and promise of ZFS was the atomic write, the always consistent state on the drive. I do think and believe this is true, and all blocks are either written and confirmed or just not. As far as I can make out, the problem has only been shifted: to the problem of metadata. Again, refer to the mailing list. Those exist in four-fold. Why? It seems the consistency of blocks on the drive being guaranteed, the layer of actually having the links to those correct data is more vulnerable. Think of a pool: if you jank the structure of a pool by janking a USB, you have 100% correct data (contrary to any other file system, I agree), but alas no more structured access to reassemble them (compared to inodes).
(The mods opting for 'informative' of your post obviously don't read the ZFS mailing list, and nobody blames them.)
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Re:Death knell (Score:5, Informative)
I have been following the zfs-discuss list for years, and almost no one has lost data.
That must be a different list than the one I've been reading....
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-April/027748.html [opensolaris.org]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-April/027765.html [opensolaris.org]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-January/025601.html [opensolaris.org]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-March/027629.html [opensolaris.org]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-March/027365.html [opensolaris.org]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-March/027257.html [opensolaris.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Windows and Solaris fall into the first category, UNIX and Linux into the second.
Are you sure you do not want to correct that statement?
Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score:3, Insightful)
WIth the impending purchase of Sun by Oracle, I'm thinking it could be one of 2 things:
1) ZFS will be killed and/or de-emphasized and/or re-licensed in such a way that Apple is not comfortable/happy with putting it into Mac OS
2) It will still be ZFS just not called ZFS anymore (either re-branded or forked by Apple or re-named by Oracle/Sun)
Re:Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Oracle hasn't publicly said anything of that nature, nor is even any rumors to that effect.
2) They aren't mentioning the features that zfs provides under any kind of name
Most likely, they've been focusing too much on the embedded space with the iphone and didn't have the man power to integrate a complex third party FS into their OS. As it was only going to be for the OSX Server for "production servers", they probably thought that was the easiest thing to drop. I mean, lets be honest no one really uses OSX Server for anything really mission critical that relies on it for the kind of storage capabilities ZFS would provide. Do they? Feel free to correct me with real world usage senarios of OSX Server ( I haven't heard of much).
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, lets be honest no one really uses OSX Server for anything really mission critical that relies on it for the kind of storage capabilities ZFS would provide. Do they? Feel free to correct me with real world usage senarios of OSX Server ( I haven't heard of much).
I guess XSans may use it. I don't know much about them to be honest, another department at work has a small one for FCP editing. Seems to me that it's the same as any old san.
Re:Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score:4, Informative)
Mac OS X Server has a few features that are hard to replicate well on other servers, basically coming down to specific Mac management (Open Directory, NetBoot, Software Update), and in particular AFP file services. There are a lot of design/production companies out there with a lot of Macs who need a reasonable amount of storage, and AFP still tends to work better for Mac clients than things like SMB. We've got a few clients with a few hundred Macs and and ZFS would have been a good additional option to have for backend storage. The snapshot and scrub features alone would be a big benefit.
Xsan is great for certain situations but Apple's tools tend to target that towards video production, and not everyone needs or can afford a full SAN.
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We do (Score:5, Informative)
We use Mac OSX Server for our infrastructure. It's a royal PITA and I now wish we hadn't done it, but there have been a number of media companies in recent years that have moved to Mac OSX Server because all their clients are OSX.
My view is that Apple is just jealous of Microsoft and said to itself that if Microsoft can drop promised new features in Vista like the DB based file system, then why can't Apple drop ZFS? ;-)
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Re:Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score:5, Informative)
The iTunes store uses Akamai. So it uses Linux, not OSX at all.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't think Akamai would be doing any of the actual work behind the iTunes store. I seem to recall they do have that capability, but it would be really hard to take advantage of unless you designed for it from the start, and even then I doubt anyone, especially a company as large as Apple, would be happy to give their content distribution network access to any of their actual user data.
Our website is served by Akamai as well, but nearly all the content is served by Windows web servers. If you do a simple GET and the page is in the cache of the Akamai server you're using, then you could maybe say it was served by Linux or whatever. If you do a search or anything that requires actual work, your request will be getting funneled back to our Windows servers.
I would say it's extremely unlikely iTunes works any differently.
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Re:Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score:5, Informative)
I'm fairly confident of what it is, having actually used zfs on OS X.
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Re:Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We retained the ability to export
One less "feature" (Score:3, Interesting)
With most of the emphasis on performance and stability, this was probably the one "feature" I was looking forward to with Snow Leopard. At $29 I'll still upgrade. Grand Central and OpenCL sound fairly impressive but I was really looking forward to a file system that never needed to be upgraded... I guess I'll keep on waiting.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was really looking forward to a file system that never needed to be upgraded...
ZFS might be the holy grail of filesystems in terms of capacity, flexibility, and data integrity, which have traditionally been the limiting factors for filesystems. However, it's not particularly fast, and I'm sure that we'll come up with better ways to store data in the future.
If Apple have their own "ZFS killer" in the works, and choose to release it under a permissive license that's compatible with the GPL, they might very well be able to displace ZFS, given that the Linux community's refusal to suppor
I want a universal filesystem (Score:4, Insightful)
Which one can you mount on Linux, MacOS and maybe even Windows without precarious hacks, and with journaling, long filenames, and maybe extended attributes? So far FAT and HFS+ without journaling seem to be about the only choices. ZFS would have been it if MacOS and Linux both ended up supporting it, but now neither of them do (without precarious hacks!)... so Solaris is off in the corner by itself again. Bah humbug.
When I dual-boot my Mac (Linux & Leopard) I'd like to have the same partition for home directory on either system. A better FS for thumb drives than FAT would be nice, too.
The situation is utterly pathetic.
Re:I want a universal filesystem (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, it's almost as if Microsoft don't want to inter-operate. Ext3 is fully documented with viewable code, yet MS don't implement it. NTFS on the other hand has to be reverse engineered.
Parent
Re:I want a universal filesystem (Score:5, Funny)
What about a pony?
-dZ.
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Re:I want a universal filesystem (Score:4, Interesting)
The last time I checked (the middle of 2008), the only way to do this was via NTFS, and the only read-write support for NTFS on OSX was the MacFUSE NTFS driver, which was pretty slow.
I just saw that MacDrive 7.2 now allows Windows Vista x64 [mediafour.com] (my Boot Camp OS) to read HFS disks, so maybe I'll give that a try. There are also rumors [roughlydrafted.com] that Snow Leopard's Boot Camp utility will include drivers for Windows to read HFS disks, so maybe that will help too.
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Integration issues (Score:5, Informative)
That would be a new feature (Score:3, Insightful)
ZFS still needs more miles under the belt (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing that ZFS failed to meet at least one of (what I imagine are) Apple's criteria:
1. has to be simple to use
2. has to be rock solid
There's a good chance it failed at both. I'm not saying that ZFS is crap. Personally I think its a brilliant design, however it needs a bit more sunlight before its ready for the Steve.
Re:ZFS still needs more miles under the belt (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, first and foremost it is well known that if you are running a database engine on top of ZFS you have to tune it to that specific database engine. This is well documented, and well described in the ZFS manuals, including steps to be taken to resolve these issues.
As for the performance degradation when the disks are close to full are being worked on, while this can cause issues (especially if you have a lot of snapshots) any IT worth their salt would not have let the disk get that close to full that it causes issues (I've seen this error once on my production servers, when the disk was at 95% capacity, I was brought in as a contractor). Replacing and upgrading disk capacity is as simple as pulling one drive from the RAID Z, placing a new one in, and letting it resilver, then pull the next one, until you have pulled all of them, after which you will get the full space the new disks can provide, so going from 1 TB drives to 1.5 TB drives will at the end of replacing all of them (so that they are now all 1.5 TB or bigger) give you the extra space.
As for 1, ZFS is extremely simple to use. gvinum from FreeBSD, or Linux's LVM are complicated, unnecessarily so, and 2, ZFS has so far proven far more reliable. It has been extremely fast, and has already saved a whole lot of trouble when a disk started failing by giving us a warning that ZFS reads were failing and letting us replace the disk before disaster strikes. Since we started using it in the last year we have had not yet had to resort to finding the backup tapes for a server because a disk went bad in Linux's LVM and bad data was written to other disks and files were lost.
I don't believe the issue is that ZFS is not ready yet, I don't think that Apple has had the time to make sure that everything fits in with their way everything has to work, certain features that HFS+ can offer are not possible on ZFS yet. Certain tools are relying on very specific HFS+ mechanics and workings (Time machine for example) which would complicate work to replicate that on ZFS.
While I was looking forward to seeing ZFS in Mac OS X, I doubted that it would be anytime soon, especially since it is a large undertaking making sure that the various parts of the system are all tuned for ZFS, this includes the way the OS caches, the amount of memory it can use for ZFS arc cache, and things along those lines. FreeBSD has slowly been working through those exact issues.
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Re:ZFS still needs more miles under the belt (Score:4, Insightful)
> you are running a database engine on top of ZFS you have to tune it to that specific database engine
Been there, done that.
> any IT worth their salt would not have let the disk get that close to full that it causes issues
I don't consider 80% a threshold which any FS should start to cause issues
> As for 1, ZFS is extremely simple to use
For unix admins perhaps. For the remaining rather large subset of Mac OS X users perhaps not.
> I don't think that Apple has had the time to make sure that everything fits in with their way everything has to work
Totally, 100% agree.
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Re:ZFS still needs more miles under the belt (Score:4, Insightful)
Our particular problem seemed to occur when free-space shrank to below 20% and we had workloads with large numbers of connections doing lots and lots of very small write transactions in Oracle (using Oracle AQ as the backing store for our ESB/BPEL implementation). It wasn't 100% reproducible but seemed to be linked to those configurations more often that not.
Having said all that, we never used ZFS for production systems (we are far too conservative a company). We used it for dev/test/UAT environments where the ability to clone large numbers of test environments cheaply, quickly and with very little disk space cost was of great benefit. Its still used in some circumstances, just not all of them. Horses for courses.
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ZFS? What ZFS? (Score:5, Funny)
There never was a ZFS. And Oceania was always at war with Eurasia.
I see no problem with that (Score:5, Insightful)
If something isn't "good enough" to make a solid product, then don't include it. This is how Vista got whittled down the way it was. The list of features that were pulled is longer than those remaining by my estimation.
KILL HFS+ WITH FIRE (Score:5, Funny)
OK, when they updated UFS in Panther I was all ^_^ because I was tired of HFS+ turning up x_x, and then they decided to make Spotlight dependent on HFS+ and I was all o_O and half the guys on Slashdot were telling me that UFS was -_+ and ZFS was coming and they were all :) over that, well guys, what kind of emoticon are you mainlining now?
Re:For those who are wondering: (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm.. karma whore much?
I'm sure 99.9% of the people on Slashdot, who care enough to open the discussion know what ZFS is, and those who don't are perfectly capable of entering the term "ZFS" into Google.
But hell, lets see if I can do this too:
Apple [wikipedia.org]:
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is an American multinational corporation which designs and manufactures consumer electronics and software products. The company's best-known hardware products include Macintosh computers, the iPod and the iPhone. Apple software includes the Mac OS X operating system, the iTunes media browser, the iLife suite of multimedia and creativity software, the iWork suite of productivity software, and Final Cut Studio, a suite of professional audio and film-industry software products. The company operates more than 250 retail stores in nine countries[2] and an online store where hardware and software products are sold.
Sorry for trolling, have a six pack and a day off.
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Re: (Score:3)
I'm sure 99.9% of the people on Slashdot, who care enough to open the discussion know what ZFS is, and those who don't are perfectly capable of entering the term "ZFS" into Google.
Alright fair enough, I mean that's what I did, but alot of slashdoters like myself whould first grumble about there not being a link to said article in the story. So I figured near the top of the comments was the next best thing.
Also, I've already got excelent karma. Once they come out with a +2 Godlike-Karma-bonus you can legitimatly troll me for karma-whoring.
Re:For those who are wondering: (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot [wikipedia.org]
(for those that got here by accident... you can't leave them out).
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ZFS not ready? (Score:4, Informative)
You're right on the button. I created a sparse file for each machine image using diskutil so I could fix maximum size (I'd hate it to take over my entire 2.5 TB pool). The trick is to figure out the name that each machine wants, but worse comes to worse, you cancel it quick on the first sync if it's wrong and then rename the file and start it again.
Then I used the native CIFS service that comes with OpenSolaris for the connection. I started with Samba, but the native CIFS service had 1000X better throughput.
There is an option that enables mounting "foreign" disks for time machine. This may explain it better:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137 [macosxhints.com]
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