Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

ariadne.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 56 posts

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#11

Post by jsiepkes »

> While I think Oracle and the Illumos and OpenZFS contributors should come together to relicense the ZFS codebase under MPLv2 to solve the GPL compatibility problem

For starters Oracle would need to relicense their work. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon. If they wanted to relicense it they would have done it by now.

All OpenZFS contributers would also need to relicense their code. If I recall correctly the OpenZFS codebase consists for close to 50% out of non-Oracle code. A lot of this code might be contributed by companies where the people who did the work no longer work there. Meaning there is no-one in those companies to get legal to sign-off on it.

Short version: Don't hold your breath.

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#12

Post by hulitu »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #10
hddherman wrote: post #4

> Nonetheless, my plans are to rebuild treefort with ZFS and SSDs from another vendor. Whatever happened with the Samsung SSDs has made me anxious enough that I don’t want to trust them for continued production use. Not sure if having one bad experience with mdraid is worth switching SSD vendors as well. You can mix and match different vendors, but they may have different performance characteristics as well. Anyway,…

I agree with getting SSDs from different vendors, for the following reason: I once had a FreeNAS system fail. It was using two (mirrored) SSDs to hold the OS. One SSD failed; while I was procuring a replacement, the second failed. I later found that both SSDs were from the same batch, which (I think) is why both failures happened so close together. Purchasing same-size SSDs from different vendors (with similar produc…

This was common knowledge on the internet before the "modern web" era. Never use in a RAID disks from the same vendor. When you have to use disks from the same vendor try hard to get different type/ batches. And backup.

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#14

Post by throwaway984393 »

You'll often find angry greybeards on here griping about how you shouldn't do X or Y. Don't run your own mail, don't write your own crypto, don't run K8s. And you'll also find greenhorns talking about how they've been doing X for 10 years and never had a problem.

The thing is, both perspectives are valid. It's true that you can sometimes do really complicated things yourself and it can work out fine. And you can also get burned really easily. So the reader needs to figure out for themselves what the risk is and if it's worth it.

But there are things we should all do that are just never easy to do right, like.... backups. There's just no cheap and easy and good way. If you want real off-site backups, you're going to have to either pay a small fortune for a managed service (either in subscription fees or network egress fees or both), or physically carry a bunch of drives or tapes somewhere else weekly/monthly. And of course you also have to restore regularly or the whole thing could be a waste. It's just a pain.

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#16

Post by Ansil849 »

There are a lot of comments here about how the author should've used ZFS, or how well now they know about ZFS, but the post addresses this:

> The other big elephant in the room, of course, is “why weren’t you using ZFS in the first place”. While it is true that Alpine has supported ZFS for years, I’ve been hesitant to use it due to the CDDL licensing. In other words, I chose the mantra instilled in me about GPL compatibility since the days when I was using GNU/Linux over pragmatism.

It's not as if the author wasn't aware of ZFS, but had issues with the license.

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#17

Post by teddyh »

TLDR: They got an error from the RAID1 array, but they re-added the broken drive to the array.

Also, they did’t have backups.

Then, they did fsck -y on the filesystems on the array incorporating the broken drive. What they probably should have done first is remove the broken drive from the array again.

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#18

Post by teddyh »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #14

You'll often find angry greybeards on here griping about how you shouldn't do X or Y. Don't run your own mail, don't write your own crypto, don't run K8s. And you'll also find greenhorns talking about how they've been doing X for 10 years and never had a problem. The thing is, both perspectives are valid. It's true that you can sometimes do really complicated things yourself and it can work out fine. And you can also…

You seem to conflate backups with off-site backups, and concluding that off-site backups are hard. However, nothing in this story would require off-site backups. A separate backup server on-site would have been fine here.

Of course, off-site backups are good, but would not have been actually needed in this case.

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#19

Post by pabs3 »

jsiepkes wrote: post #11

> While I think Oracle and the Illumos and OpenZFS contributors should come together to relicense the ZFS codebase under MPLv2 to solve the GPL compatibility problem For starters Oracle would need to relicense their work. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon. If they wanted to relicense it they would have done it by now. All OpenZFS contributers would also need to relicense their code. If I recall correctly the…

All Oracle needs to do is release CDDL 2.0 that says "At your option, you may choose to relicense CDDL 1.0 licensed code under any of the MPLv2, LGPLv2+, GPLv2+, AGPLv3+ licenses" and then anyone can relicense any CDDL 1.0 code from any copyright holder under those licenses, since CDDL 1.0 contains a license upgrade clause. That would solve the situation for OpenZFS contributor's code too and also Oracles code and also dtrace/Solaris/etc code in general.

Re: I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home dir

#20

Post by jsiepkes »

pabs3 wrote: post #19
jsiepkes wrote: post #11

> While I think Oracle and the Illumos and OpenZFS contributors should come together to relicense the ZFS codebase under MPLv2 to solve the GPL compatibility problem For starters Oracle would need to relicense their work. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon. If they wanted to relicense it they would have done it by now. All OpenZFS contributers would also need to relicense their code. If I recall correctly the…

All Oracle needs to do is release CDDL 2.0 that says "At your option, you may choose to relicense CDDL 1.0 licensed code under any of the MPLv2, LGPLv2+, GPLv2+, AGPLv3+ licenses" and then anyone can relicense any CDDL 1.0 code from any copyright holder under those licenses, since CDDL 1.0 contains a license upgrade clause. That would solve the situation for OpenZFS contributor's code too and also Oracles code and al…

That would have consequences reaching far beyond ZFS. A blastzone which no one will be able to oversee.

I would therefor say it is extremely unlikely any company (let alone Oracle) would ever sign-off on such a thing.

Post reply on HN