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Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#41

Post by gh02t »

tombert wrote: post #38
gh02t wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, there are some nice perks to having a system that runs on ZFS. Due to its frequently-snapshotting nature, it's much easier to do risky stuff without having to worry about nuking the whole system, since you can always revert to the previous snapshot (kind of like Git). Agreed, this is an amazing feature, as are jails to keep things compartmentalized. I hate having to clutter my FreeBSD home server root inst…

While I do love Btrfs and use it on my Linux laptops, there's more to ZFS than just snapshotting. Raid-Z is a great soft-raid that allows you to lose up to 3 disks (depending on your configuration level), and `zfs send` is really useful for keeping disks synchronized on different machines.

Yep, I use both on my FreeBSD server. RAIDZ is great, though like most non-enterprise users I wish ZFS was a bit more flexible when it came to growing volumes. I also use `zfs send`, that's what I was referring to with moving jails around and it's very handy.

Btrfs has similar features with `btrfs send` and RAID, though the parity RAID modes most similar to RAIDZ have kind of a troubled history (https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56) and I wouldn't recommend using Btrfs RAID5/6 for valuable data. ZFS RAIDZ is also superior in terms of reliability because it does a full-stripe write and ZFS has some other features for server use (e.g. zvols). Btrfs is more flexible with regards to growing or shrinking a RAID volume, but again the code is not considered production ready and has some pretty severe drawbacks.

That said, I used Btrfs RAID5 on a small compute cluster and it's never had any issues, but if I was going to do it again I'd use ZFS there.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#42

Post by tracker1 »

tombert wrote: post #38
gh02t wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, there are some nice perks to having a system that runs on ZFS. Due to its frequently-snapshotting nature, it's much easier to do risky stuff without having to worry about nuking the whole system, since you can always revert to the previous snapshot (kind of like Git). Agreed, this is an amazing feature, as are jails to keep things compartmentalized. I hate having to clutter my FreeBSD home server root inst…

While I do love Btrfs and use it on my Linux laptops, there's more to ZFS than just snapshotting. Raid-Z is a great soft-raid that allows you to lose up to 3 disks (depending on your configuration level), and `zfs send` is really useful for keeping disks synchronized on different machines.

Just want to point out two caveats wrt Raid-Z2/3, and that is have a LOT of ECC Ram (wouldn't suggest less than 16GB, and more than 32 is better). Second is if you have a hot spare, test your configuration to make sure it loads the hot spare.

Aside: I ran a homebrew FreeNAS (forget the version, was several years ago now) with 12x3TB drives, without ECC, and the version of freenas had a bug that didn't pickup the drive designated as a hot spare when the first drive died... They were horrible Seagate 3tb 7200.xx drives, and they all died way too close together... in the end, lost most of the system... when I finally got around to testing the drives (didn't have the heart/energy after for a while) all but 2 had significant errors.

That's more a knock against Seagate (will NEVER buy from them again) than ZFS though. Will also not likely do a homebrew nas server ever again, didn't save enough over Synololgy that made the cost savings vs. time worthwhile, but ymmv.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#43

Post by baldfat »

K0SM0S wrote: post #39
baldfat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still fail to see the benefit for a desktop user with ZFS or BTRFS. I find that backing up policy of 2 copies local and one off site (I use CrashPlan) is a very robust system that saves any data loss. My main data loss comes from hardware problems or a command problem like mv photo.jpg and forget the don't over wirte command. That's a simple fix on my side. I copy the effected file over.

I can only speak for myself, but here's the gist of it. (Not an expert in this field so please bear with me if I'm too fuzzy or not rigorous enough). - COW[0] + snapshotting[1] basically give you git-like rollback/failsafe capability. You could e.g. trigger it manually before updating or tweaking stuff, or have it automated everytime you run some pacman/apt/yast/whatever. - subvolumes[2] give you the features of part…

I ran a btrfs on two production machines and it was more of a headache then a benefit. Now on my server it was a great tool. I could snapshot have an issue then restore to where it was. Desktop has to many file changes and applications from normal uses to be of benefit to me.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#44

Post by tracker1 »

baldfat wrote: post #26
nec4b wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose PC-BSD because i had a bad data loss and wanted something more reliable. ZFS on FreeBSD is very mature and stable and PC-BSD provided nice desktop integration. For stuff I couldn't do on PC-BSD I used Windows virtual machine. I don't have anything against Linux. But last I read, ZFS on Linux is not native and integrated into the system as well as on PC-BSD. I was thinking more along the line of building a sma…

I still fail to see the benefit for a desktop user with ZFS or BTRFS. I find that backing up policy of 2 copies local and one off site (I use CrashPlan) is a very robust system that saves any data loss. My main data loss comes from hardware problems or a command problem like mv photo.jpg and forget the don't over wirte command. That's a simple fix on my side. I copy the effected file over.

Beyond what others have said.. raid isn't backup and backup isn't raid.... re-installing your OS and restoring from backup takes a lot of time... recovering from a down disk in a redundant array means you aren't down during that time... install a disk to replace the bad one, and continue about your daily life.

That said, it's always an exercise in frustration, and if personal hardware unexpected cost, when a drive dies. That said, it's still less down time than a full recovery.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#45

Post by K0SM0S »

baldfat wrote: post #43
K0SM0S wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for myself, but here's the gist of it. (Not an expert in this field so please bear with me if I'm too fuzzy or not rigorous enough). - COW[0] + snapshotting[1] basically give you git-like rollback/failsafe capability. You could e.g. trigger it manually before updating or tweaking stuff, or have it automated everytime you run some pacman/apt/yast/whatever. - subvolumes[2] give you the features of part…

I ran a btrfs on two production machines and it was more of a headache then a benefit. Now on my server it was a great tool. I could snapshot have an issue then restore to where it was. Desktop has to many file changes and applications from normal uses to be of benefit to me.

Agreed you need a bit of pre-thinking going into this.

- I don't see much activity on the root volume, most of it in my case is either from VMs or userland.

- For VMs I use discrete subvolumes, different fs/snapshot/backup strategies given the intricacies of this use-case. You'd typically snapshot VMs from the hypervisor itself.

- /home is its own subvol, with again specific settings. I typically disable COW on /home but adopt a much more agressive snapshot policy (e.g. every hour). Whereas system (/) can COW a lot with little to no performance impact, but snapshot only once a day is usually fine.

Note that I only use SSDs (either 2x RAID 0 over SATA 3, or NVMe) and my workstation is a beefy one; so that may explain why I don't see any resource issue whatsoever with these admittedly heavier filesystems (btrfs being much leaner than ZFS in this regard, depending on how you setup the latter).

My personal intuition is that major OS suppliers will eventually move to such 'modern' fs under the hood for most users, if only to provide easy rollback/backup features that actually work fine and fast. But it takes years to validate a new fs on an existing architecture, so I wouldn't expect that for Windows or MacOS until the next 'major' version (post-10.x, amusingly in both cases).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#46

Post by tombert »

tracker1 wrote: post #42
tombert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do love Btrfs and use it on my Linux laptops, there's more to ZFS than just snapshotting. Raid-Z is a great soft-raid that allows you to lose up to 3 disks (depending on your configuration level), and `zfs send` is really useful for keeping disks synchronized on different machines.

Just want to point out two caveats wrt Raid-Z2/3, and that is have a LOT of ECC Ram (wouldn't suggest less than 16GB, and more than 32 is better). Second is if you have a hot spare, test your configuration to make sure it loads the hot spare. Aside: I ran a homebrew FreeNAS (forget the version, was several years ago now) with 12x3TB drives, without ECC, and the version of freenas had a bug that didn't pickup the driv…

I've had pretty good luck on my homebrew FreeNAS server that I ran about a year ago. I only had 8GB of RAM, and I managed to lose drives and replace them without losing data...maybe the bug you had got fixed by the time I used it?

Now this server runs on ZFS on Linux using Proxmox, though admittedly I did up the RAM to 32GB.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#47

Post by tombert »

gh02t wrote: post #41
tombert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do love Btrfs and use it on my Linux laptops, there's more to ZFS than just snapshotting. Raid-Z is a great soft-raid that allows you to lose up to 3 disks (depending on your configuration level), and `zfs send` is really useful for keeping disks synchronized on different machines.

Yep, I use both on my FreeBSD server. RAIDZ is great, though like most non-enterprise users I wish ZFS was a bit more flexible when it came to growing volumes. I also use `zfs send`, that's what I was referring to with moving jails around and it's very handy. Btrfs has similar features with `btrfs send` and RAID, though the parity RAID modes most similar to RAIDZ have kind of a troubled history ( https://btrfs.wiki.k…

Yeah, wasn't trying to question your setup, I was just doing the HN thing where I have to reply and go into greater detail for ego-related reasons.

I actually did not know that Btrfs had a send function, I'll have to play with that on one of my laptops.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#48

Post by tracker1 »

tombert wrote: post #46
tracker1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to point out two caveats wrt Raid-Z2/3, and that is have a LOT of ECC Ram (wouldn't suggest less than 16GB, and more than 32 is better). Second is if you have a hot spare, test your configuration to make sure it loads the hot spare. Aside: I ran a homebrew FreeNAS (forget the version, was several years ago now) with 12x3TB drives, without ECC, and the version of freenas had a bug that didn't pickup the driv…

I've had pretty good luck on my homebrew FreeNAS server that I ran about a year ago. I only had 8GB of RAM, and I managed to lose drives and replace them without losing data...maybe the bug you had got fixed by the time I used it? Now this server runs on ZFS on Linux using Proxmox, though admittedly I did up the RAM to 32GB.

The issue was fixed 2 versions down from the one I had started with... but there were cascading drive failures... wound up putting 4x4TB wd reds in my old synology box, managed to get a few things off of the freenas server, but it died rather painfully... would hard lock after about 10-15 minutes requiring a reboot... start copying again... after a day of that, I had most of my music, some of my commercial software and a few other things... lost all my dvd/br rips, etc...

Thinking of another synology box in a few months, bumping to more or larger drives. Though, space would be less of a problem if I were willing to re-rip everything to h.265, finally got my settings for the nv encoder pretty well balanced, just a lot of time.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#49

Post by luckydude »

PleaseHelpMe wrote: post #28
geff82 wrote: post #3

It is very picky on the hardware it supports out of the box. That means you'll get problems with Hardware that came out after Haswell. It works ok on my Lenovo X240 (that I bought brand new in Juli 2016 in a maxed out version at a very good price). But after a short trial I decided to go with Xubuntu as the hardware support is much better and most developer relevant software today runs on Linux without hassles. I lov…

Xubuntu user here. Very nice, lightweight distro. Highly recommended for any developers

Me too. Light enough that I don't notice it but mainstream enough that stuff just works.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#50

Post by nec4b »

baldfat wrote: post #26
nec4b wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose PC-BSD because i had a bad data loss and wanted something more reliable. ZFS on FreeBSD is very mature and stable and PC-BSD provided nice desktop integration. For stuff I couldn't do on PC-BSD I used Windows virtual machine. I don't have anything against Linux. But last I read, ZFS on Linux is not native and integrated into the system as well as on PC-BSD. I was thinking more along the line of building a sma…

I still fail to see the benefit for a desktop user with ZFS or BTRFS. I find that backing up policy of 2 copies local and one off site (I use CrashPlan) is a very robust system that saves any data loss. My main data loss comes from hardware problems or a command problem like mv photo.jpg and forget the don't over wirte command. That's a simple fix on my side. I copy the effected file over.

Snapshots - e.g. i had several versions of xorg.conf to play with

Boot environments - saved me many times while learning about BSD

Periodic data checks

Datasets - are like standalone filesystems which you can tailor for specific use (use compression,...)

I have TrueOS instaled on a workstation and I use ZFS raid10 for reliability. I also have offline backups, but it sure is nice not to worry about that, unless something really out of ordinary happens.

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