How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.). I could buy a new external disk, add it to a pool, have seamless storage expansion.
It would be great. Ah, what could have been.
How cool would it be if we had a great TUI for ZFS...
Live in the now: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm
As a Rust project, it's something of a duty to hype and self-promote, and to troll C++, of course. So let it be known: If you're not using httm, you're not using modern ZFS. Or -- httm is the cppfront of ZFS utilities? Or -- httm is the 'auto' keyword for filesystems, but less confusing (to me)?
I'll work on it.
See QNAP HERO 5:
https://www.qnap.com/static/landing/2021/quts-hero-5.0/en/in...
NAS Options:
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/?conditions=4-3
// This was about MacOS, and yes, that would be cool. But QNAP is remarkably MacOS-friendly, including Thunderbolt and Time Machine support.
And HERO OS is only available on the Enterprise range of NAS, not even Prosumer class NAS.
I have TVS-h1288X and I am really happy with it, maybe it's a bit overkill for most.
That said, I could not use zfs send from my prev fbsd server, there are some compat checks in QNAP's version. Used nfs to migrate from my decade++ old pool.
Using Tailscale for access, they have QNAP builds on GH.
So it's not just a check for check's sake, I would suspect in practice their send/recv is just completely incompatible at this point.
If you're happily using their devices, this may not matter to you, but since the post is about OpenZFS...
I would certainly not put it past Jobs. While he had some genius qualities, his personality was pretty deeply flawed. But on the other hand I wonder if his sense for business would not have prevailed.
If only Apple had absorbed sun instead of oracle, their legacy would have been better off. Of course it couldn't have been worse.
Which also made me wonder, of course Jobs and Ellison were big friends so perhaps Jobs just left it for him to take? Oracle always wanted to get their hands on java obviously.
Ps the whole ZFS on Mac adventure came a little after time machine was already in production.
ZFS is indeed an amazing desktop filesystem. I'm using it now on FreeBSD, I moved away from Mac because it became ever more closed down. I wanted more control, not less.
But when all this happened they still did, yes.
Apple would have killed Java in half a second. They don't need it, it was built to do the opposite of what they want their tech to do. Same for Solaris, burdensome duplicate. As for all the desktop-oriented FOSS projects (OpenOffice, VirtualBox etc), they would not have just been killed - Apple would have viciously bullied anyone to preclude them from forking them. The stuff they'd keep (MySql, probably), they would have made osx-only, and then strangled them quietly after they got out of the server game. They would have ripped anything technologically interesting from the hardware divisions and then shut them down - because they were no match, in terms of supply efficiency and value, for the Apple equivalents; and anyway they were never seriously interested in the server space.
Oracle did what Oracle does, and realistically the culture clash was never going to result in a smooth transition; but from a commercial perspective they kept around the best of what Sun was making (Java, servers) and largely let the community get on with the stuff they weren't interested in (if rebranded/forked). The only real crime they committed, IMHO, was trying too hard to make money from VirtualBox, effectively spooking the market; there is a different timeline where VBox ends up being what Docker became. But everything else was par for the course.
Not in workstation OS, maybe not "great" but tools like FreeNAS had ZFS GUI sorted out[1] pretty decently and user-friendly for some time. I've seen storage laymen set these up, learn on the go and not screw up.
[1] https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/FreeNAS_1.jpg
[1] https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/9.3/freenas_...
https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manag...
ZFS's separate cache meant that the better choice was APFS. Once they got around to writing it.
And on drives at least, TM backups ARE APFS snapshots.
As a workaround, you can create a sparsevolume to store your parallels volume. Sparsevolumes are stores in bands, and only bands that change get backed up. It might be slightly more efficient.
You still can't do that with ZFS though, that's what this PR is for.
So if over the years I got, say, five disks of varying quality - I shouldn't add them to a pool as five individual vdevs :)
Yes, that's why you don't have single-disk vdevs.
I believe that was something built into the file manager in OpenSolaris, and then into illumos OS's. OpenIndiana has it in their file manager within their themed MATE desktop environment.