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FreeBSD 10.0 and ZFS

It’s finally here: FreeBSD 10.0 with ZFS. I’ve been pretty happy for many years with twin-drive systems protected using gmirror and UFS. It does what I want. If a disk fails it drops it out and sends me an email, but otherwise carries on. When I put a replacement blank disk it can re-build the mirror. If I take one disk out, put it into another machine and boot it, it’ll wake up happy. It’s robust!

So why mess around with ZFS, the system that puts your drives in to a pool and decides where things are stored, so you don’t have to worry your pretty little head about it? The snag is that the old ways are dying out, and sooner or later you’ll have no choice.

Unfortunately, the transition hasn’t been that smooth. First off you have to consider 2Tb+ drives and how you partition them. MBR partition tables have difficulties with the number of sectors, although AF drives with larger sectors can bodge around this. It can get messy though, as many systems expect 512b sectors, not 4k, so everything has to be AF-aware. In my experience, it’s not worth the hassle.

The snag with the new and limitless “GPT” scheme is that it keeps safe copies of the partition at the end of the disk, as well as the start. This tends to be where gmirror stores its meta-data too. You can’t mix gmirror and GPT. Although the code is hackable, I’ve got better things to do.

So the good new is that it does actually work as a replacement for gmirror. To test it I stuck two new 3Tb AF drives into a server and installed 10.0 using the new procedure, selecting the menu option zfs on root option and GPT partitioning. This is shown in the menu as “Experimental”, but seems to work. What you end up with, if you select two drives and say you want a zfs mirror, is just that.

Being the suspicious type, I pulled each of the drives in turn to see what had happened, and the system continues without a beat just like gmirror did. There were also a nice surprises when I stuck the drives back in and “onlined” them:

First-off the re-build was almost instant. Secondly, HP’s “non-hot-swap” drive bays work just fine for hot-swap under FreeBSD/ZFS. I’d always suspected this was a Windoze nonsense. All good news.

So why is the re-build so fast? It’s obvious when you consider what’s going on. The GEOM system works a block level. If the mirror is broken it has no way of telling which blocks are valid, so the only option is to copy them all. A major feature of ZFS, however, is that the directories and files have validation codes in the blocks above, going all the way to the root. Therefore, by starting at the root and chaining down, it’s easy to find the blocks containing changed data, and copy them. Nice! Getting rid of separate volume managers and file systems has its advantages.

So am I comfortable with ZFS? Not yet, but I’m a lot happier with it when its a complete, integrated solution. Previously I’d only been using on data drives in multi-drive configurations, as although it was possible to install root on ZFS, it was a real PITA.

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Advertorial in Process Engineering Control & Maintenance

The relationship between journals and advertisers has always been tricky, with many of them forced to say nice things, or at least avoid saying anything bad concerning major advertisers. In my day as an editor I was free to say what I liked, as no advertiser could afford to stop advertising because it was the best route to reaching potential customers before the Internet.

Times have certainly changed, and today marks a new low. We’ve intercepted several spammed messages offering to sell editorial in Process Engineering Control and Maintenance. Normally I wouldn’t draw attention to this, but they were sent to a spamming list and picked up by no less than six honeypots – addresses than no legitimate sender of bulk mail should be using. Therefore they’re fair game.

Dear Public Relations Manager

I deal with the editorial content for the Process Engineering Control & Maintenance publication, and are just putting together our editorial feature pages within our February edition, this is a very special edition as this will not only be distributed to our exclusive 100,000 named circulation but an extra 5,000 copies will also be distributed at MAINTEC, Sustainability Live & National Electronics Week to the wide range of purchasing professionals that attend.

I wanted to contact you to see if you would be able to provide some editorial content for this special edition.

The only cost to include a press release within this special edition would be a small editorial set up fee of just £85…

…As I am only able to offer this editorial opportunity to the first few companies to respond to this offer, please email me the editorial content that you would like to include, and please confirm that you would be happy to pay the £85 set up fee.

Please generate and paste your ad code here. If left empty, the ad location will be highlighted on your blog pages with a reminder to enter your code. Mid-Post

Kind Regards

******* ******** CIE

[name and telephone number deleted]

If you’re one of the 105,000 people “lucky” enough to get a copy of the magazine, you have been warned.

 

 

 

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Direct Response monitored alarms fail to show

Not to an alarm call out, but they had an appointment at 9am today to talk about their monitoring service. At 9:30 they called to say they weren’t coming with the excuse that they’d tried to call to confirm the appointment but couldn’t get through. Except they confirmed it yesterday afternoon and there’s someone on the hot-line number they claim to have used since 6am today.

Okay, they double booked slots and got caught with their pants down and this is the best they could come up with, but a company trying to sell an ARC service, not showing for an appointment has to be the biggest no-no going. LOL!

They’re actually possibly worth talking to, because they use the rather interesting Risco panels. Risco is an Israeli company, and they’re upping the game by integrating CCTV and IDS in one system with PIR detectors that will take a snapshot of what triggered them and sending to the ARC. The lady on the phone said they just wanted to demonstrate this, and I couldn’t resist even though we’re happy with the British-made Texecom kit (although we use Risco beam sensors already).

However, this is the same Direct Response that got hauled before the OFT and clobbered in 2009 for telling porky pies about their monitored alarms getting a priority response from the police. The caller also claimed the alarms were made in Iran (“or somewhere like that”). And they’re still using the same old sales tactics (“We are calling as part of an awareness campaign, and four people in your area will be selected at random for a free alarm worth £999”, without mentioning the £400 installation fee up front and claiming a £5/week monitoring fee – I’ll be pleasantly surprised if this bit is true).

The appointment’s been re-made for 9am on Monday. Let’s see. In fairness, I did warn the first and second callers that they hadn’t called a normal householder. All they gotta do is Google me.

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BBC pulls Queen’s Christmas message

The BBC iPlayer is supposed to “make the unmissable, unmissable”, according to the BBC itself. That only applies if the BBC itself wants you (the license payers) to see something.

Even before Christmas was over, the Queen’s Christmas Message was removed from the playlist. What’s the excuse? I’m still waiting for a reply to that one (and ITV don’t feature it either). It was produced by the BBC this year, and there doesn’t seem to me to be any technical reason why they can’t keep it there for the duration of Christmas, if not the whole year. it’s not just iPlayer; it’s been dropped from the BBC web site too.

The BBC is, of course, embroiled in allegations of left-wing political and social bias, and this seems a likely explanation. At the very least, lefty decision makers will have regarded the Queens Message as unimportant and dropped it quickly.

The BBC once had a monopoly on the Royal Christmas Message, but this was ended in 1997 when it was announced that ITN would alternate with it (and Sky joined the rotation in 2011). At the time it was speculated that this decision reflected the Palace’s displeasure with the low-brow coverage of Royal matters within BBC News and Current Affairs. You can’t argue with that, although it was denied by Buckingham Palace. Subsequent revelations tend to back this up, and show it was the right decision.

It comes to something when the state broadcaster, funded by the nation, fails in its duty to make the Queen’s message available, forcing everyone on to YouTube to watch it. Perhaps its time to drop the BBC from the production rota and replace them with Google.