ZFS...

[Michelle Sullivan]

Michelle Sullivan
http://www.mhix.org/
Sent from my iPad

> On 07 May 2019, at 10:53, Paul Mather <paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On May 6, 2019, at 10:14 AM, Michelle Sullivan <michelle at sorbs.net> wrote:
>> 
>> My issue here (and not really what the blog is about) FreeBSD is defaulting to it.
> 
> You've said this at least twice now in this thread so I'm assuming you're asserting it to be true.
> 
> As of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE (and all earlier releases), FreeBSD does NOT default to ZFS.
> 
> The images distributed by freebsd.org, e.g., Vagrant boxes, ARM images, EC2 instances, etc., contain disk images where FreeBSD resides on UFS.  For example, here's what you end up with when you launch a 12.0-RELEASE instance using defaults on AWS (us-east-1 region: ami-03b0f822e17669866):
> 
> root at freebsd:/usr/home/ec2-user # gpart show
> =>       3  20971509  ada0  GPT  (10G)
>         3       123     1  freebsd-boot  (62K)
>       126  20971386     2  freebsd-ufs  (10G)
> 
> And this is what you get when you "vagrant up" the freebsd/FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE box:
> 
> root at freebsd:/home/vagrant # gpart show
> =>       3  65013755  ada0  GPT  (31G)
>         3       123     1  freebsd-boot  (62K)
>       126   2097152     2  freebsd-swap  (1.0G)
>   2097278  62914560     3  freebsd-ufs  (30G)
>  65011838      1920        - free -  (960K)
> 
> 
> When you install from the 12.0-RELEASE ISO, the first option listed during the partitioning stage is "Auto (UFS)  Guided Disk Setup".  The last option listed---after "Open a shell and partition by hand" is "Auto (ZFS)  Guided Root-on-ZFS".  In other words, you have to skip over UFS and manual partitioning to select the ZFS install option.
> 
> So, I don't see what evidence there is that FreeBSD is defaulting to ZFS.  It hasn't up to now. Will FreeBSD 13 default to ZFS?
> 

Umm.. well I install by memory stick images and I had a 10.2 and an 11.0 both of which had root on zfs as the default.. I had to manually change them.  I haven’t looked at anything later...  so did something change?  Am I in cloud cookoo land?



> 
>> FreeBSD used to be targeted at enterprise and devs (which is where I found it)... however the last few years have been a big push into the consumer (compete with Linux) market.. so you have an OS that concerns itself with the desktop and upgrade after upgrade after upgrade (not just patching security issues, but upgrades as well.. just like windows and OSX)... I get it.. the money is in the keeping of the user base.. but then you install a file system which is dangerous on a single disk by default... dangerous because it’s trusted and “can’t fail” .. until it goes titsup.com and then the entire drive is lost and all the data on it..  it’s the double standard... advocate you need ECC ram, multiple vdevs etc, then single drive it.. sorry.. which one is it? Gaaaaaarrrrrrrgggghhhhhhh!
> 
> 
> As people have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it's false to claim that ZFS is unsafe on consumer hardware.  It's no less safe than UFS on single-disk setups.
> 
> Because anecdote is not evidence, I will refrain from saying, "I've lost far more data on UFS than I have on ZFS (especially when SUJ was shaking out its bugs)..." >;-)
> 
> What I will agree with is that, probably due to its relative youth, ZFS has less forensics/data recovery tools than UFS.  I'm sure this will improve as time goes on.  (I even posted a link to an article describing someone adding ZFS support to a forensics toolkit earlier in this thread.)

The problem I see with that statement is that the zfs dev mailing lists constantly and consistently following the line of, the data is always right there is no need for a “fsck” (which I actually get) but it’s used to shut down every thread... the irony is I’m now installing windows 7 and SP1 on a usb stick (well it’s actually installed, but sp1 isn’t finished yet) so I can install a zfs data recovery tool which reports to be able to “walk the data” to retrieve all the files...  the irony eh... install windows7 on a usb stick to recover a FreeBSD installed zfs filesystem...  will let you know if the tool works, but as it was recommended by a dev I’m hopeful... have another array (with zfs I might add) loaded and ready to go... if the data recovery is successful I’ll blow away the original machine and work out what OS and drive setup will be safe for the data in the future.  I might even put FreeBSD and zfs back on it, but if I do it won’t be in the current Zraid2 config.


> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Paul.