Author: Martin Matuška

Talk at BSDDay 2010 in Budapest, Hungary

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Last Saturday (20.11.2010) I attended the BSD Day 2010 at the Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. The event was sponsored by the Hungarian BSD Association and excellently organized by the hungarian FreeBSD developer Gábor Páli.

There have been several good talks including the talks of my friends Daniel Geržo (How the FreeBSD Project Works) and Roman Divácky (Clang/LLVM in the Base System).

My talk was “ZFS and FreeBSD“.
Presentation slides
Video recording from the presentation Continue reading →

Smbldap-tools back on track with new version 0.9.6

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The smbldap-tools project (founded by Jérôme Tournier) maintains a set of perl scripts to manage users and groups stored in a LDAP directory.
It focuses on samba installations and supports LDAP mail routing schema, too.

The project has been inactive since April 2008, leaving a bunch of open bugs. I have been maintaining the smbldap-tools FreeBSD port since 2007 and wrote several patches and bugfixes. Last month I contacted Jérôme if I might join the development team because my set of patches started to grow. Jérôme accepted me and I pushed all my changes into SVN at gna.org. Continue reading →

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Autocreate and autosieve patches for Cyrus IMAP Server 2.4

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Cyrus IMAP Server [1] by the Carnegie Mellon University is my favourite IMAP server.
It operates independenent of other system parts and supports server-stored SIEVE scripts for incoming mail processing.
The Autocreate INBOX and autosievefolder patches [2] by University of Athens are very useful patches for LDAP-based installations of Cyrus IMAP. Continue reading →

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Viewing ZFS statistics with zfs-stats

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The FreeBSD operating system collects statistical data from the ZFS subsystem using mechanisms originating from the OpenSolaris kstat framework.
This data is stored in sysctl variables (sysctl kstat.zfs). I have been recently working on improving a script named arc_summary.pl that was originally written by Ben Rockwood and modified by Jason J. Hellenthal. I have rewritten large parts of this script and renamed it to zfs-stats, as it’s output is not limited to ARC anymore. Continue reading →

ZFS talk at the EuroBSDCon 2010 conference

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ZFS talk at EuroBSDcon 2010

Last weekend (8.-10.10.2010) I held a talk at the EuroBSDCon 2010 conference in Karlsruhe, Germany.

It is probably the most popular european BSD conference and it is being attended by many developers of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. The talks covered innovations in the BSD operating systems and new projects have been presented, too.

I personally liked the Journaled Soft-updates talk by Marshall Kirk McKusick and the Contiki – The OS for the Internet of Things talk by Oliver Schmidt.

My talk was called Quo vadis ZFS and was about the ZFS filesystem with focus on the present state of the availability and development of ZFS.
Presentation slides for download: 2010-EuroBSDCon-Quo-vadis-ZFS.pdf Continue reading →

SPF patch for Postfix

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SPF (sender policy framework) is a working but disputable method of SPAM protection.
It prevents fake sender addresses.

I have updated the SPF patch from Nigel Kukard for Postfix 2.7.1, fixed IPv6 support and added the permissive option “permit_spf_valid_sender”. With this patch the libspf2 library is called directly from Postfix. This patch is already available in the FreeBSD mail/postfix port as a selectable option.

Update 2011-02-07: I have updated the patch for 2.8.0

Patch README:
postfix-2.7.1-libspf2-1.2.x-4.README.txt
postfix-2.8.0-libspf2-1.2.x-4.README.txt

Patch download:
postfix-2.7.1-libspf2-1.2.x-4.patch
postfix-2.8.0-libspf2-1.2.x-0.patch
Continue reading →

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Help testing ZFS v28 in FreeBSD

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Pawel Jakub Dawidek has released a patch [1] to test ZFS version 28 in FreeBSD development version (9-CURRENT).
The patch is highly experimental and not guaranteed to work correctly. We want to correct any bugs and issues related to this patch.

What is new in v28 (compared to v15)?

  • data deduplication
  • triple parity RAIDZ
  • removal of log devices
  • zfs diff
  • zpool split
  • snapshot holds

You can read more about various ZFS pool versions in my previous article [2]. Continue reading →

ZFS in various operating systems

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As I stated in one of my previous articles [1], there will be no more OpenSolaris releases and the project will probably end. We can’t say that about ZFS which is one of its greatest advantages. In this article I am going to describe several operating systems that implement ZFS.

I want to list the following operating systems, distributions and projects covering ZFS (Zettabyte Filesystem):

  1. OpenSolaris
  2. Solaris
  3. FreeBSD
  4. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
  5. Linux
  6. Nexenta
  7. IllumOS

Continue reading →

Posted in ZFS

ZFS pool and filesystem versions

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Many articles with ZFS-related topics mention ZFS versions, “ZFS pool versions” and “ZFS filesystem versions”.
What are these and what do the version numbers mean?

ZFS has three main structures exposed to the user – ZFS storage pools, ZFS datasets and ZFS volumes.
A ZFS storage pool consists of one or more block devices (“vdevs”, e.g. hard drives or partitions) that operate in various modes (JBOD, mirror, RAID-Z). ZFS storage pools are operated with the “zpool” command. Each ZFS storage pool can contain ZFS volumes and ZFS datasets. ZFS volumes are virtual block devices that can be used in the operating system like any other block device. ZFS datasets are the user visible ZFS filesystems that contain files and directories and are operated with the “zfs” command.

ZFS storage pools and filesystems have received many new features. Some of these features are not backwards compatible. Each incompatible change leads to storage pool or filesystem version bump. ZFS volumes have no version numbers. ZFS is designed to be backwards compatible – systems with newer versions can operate with pools and filesystems of older versions. Continue reading →

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The End of OpenSolaris

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OpenSolaris
An internal memo from Oracle leaked to the internet containing strategical information about the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems

There are many opinions on this message, many of them are quite emotional. Many readers react on the interpretations of this message, so if someone is really concerned about this matter I suggest reading the memo (link in the full entry).

Anyway, I would like to provide a brief summary of my interpretation:

1. Oracle is leaving OpenSolaris and there will be no more releases
2. The CDDL-licensed open-source code will keep its license
3. Source code will be published, but only some time after full releases
4. Main focus is on Solaris 11 which is going to be released next year
5. By the end of the year, strong>Solaris 11 Express will be released under a “free developer RTU” license
Continue reading →

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