Category Archives: Software

First Alpha Release of ZFS Using FUSE for Linux with Write Support

Posted on by

Ricardo Correia has announced on his blog about porting Sun Solaris’s ZFS to Linux using FUSE that he has an alpha release with working write support out:

Performance sucks right now, but should improve before 0.4.0 final, when a multi-threaded event loop and kernel caching support are working (both of these should be easy to implement, FUSE provides the kernel caching).

He might be being a little modest about performance, one commenter (Stan) wrote:

Awesome! I compared a zpool with a single file (rather than a partition) compared to ext2 on loopback to a single file. With bonnie++, I was impressed to see the performance of zfs-fuse was only 10-20% slower than ext2.

Stan then went and tried another interesting test:

For fun, check out what happens when you turn compression on and run bonnie++. The bonnie++ test files compress 28x, and the read and write rates quadruple! It’s not a realistic scenario, but interesting to see.

Ricardos list of what should be working in this release is pretty impressive:

  • Creation, modification and destruction of ZFS pools, filesystems, snapshots and clones.
  • Dynamic striping (RAID-0), mirroring (RAID-1), RAID-Z and RAID-Z2.
  • It supports any vdev configuration which is supported by the original Solaris implementation.
  • You can use any block device or file as a vdev (except files stored inside ZFS itself).
  • Compression, checksumming, error detection, self-healing (on redundant pools).
  • Quotas and reservations.

Read his STATUS file to find out what isn’t working too (the main one there I spotted was zfs send and recv).

Caveat: this is an alpha release, so it might eat your data.

Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 1 released

Posted on by

Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta1 has been released.

This is a complete rebase from the version of Vacation at Savannah Non-GNU which had been released under the modified BSD license with no advertising clause. This actually means Vacation finally links legally with GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)!

This beta also includes a patch graciously supplied by Roberto Piola that makes Vacation ignore emails that have the SpamAssassin “X-Spam-Status: Yes” header set, indicating that it believes they are spam.

As a beta release from a new codebase you should keep the usual caveats in mind, it may not reply to emails, core dump randomly, blow up, eat your dog or even work properly. We would appreciate reports of all of those instances (well, except maybe for the dog) to the vacation-list kindly hosted at SourceForge.

See the mailing list summary for Vacation to find out how to join the list.

Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda (as they say where I come from). 🙂

Chris

Updated to PHP 5.2.0

Posted on by

I’ve upgraded this server to PHP 5.2.0 using the Debian Backports repository, please post a comment or email me (send it to chris at this domain) if you spot any problems!

First impressions are very good, I’ve not been bitten by these WordPress problems (yet) and memory usage seems a hell of a lot better than 5.1. The only wrinkle is that I had to increase memory_limit to 128M to get posting articles to work, but whereas before that would have killed the system completely it seems OK for now..

Unmaintained Free Software Wiki

Posted on by

The free software world, as in any other field of human endeavour, has people and their interests come and go over time. This can leave projects unmaintained, but it is not necessarily the end of the world. Because of the licenses that are used others are quite free to take up the reins and resurrect a project (as myself and Brian have done with the Vacation program).

The real issue is people knowing about the projects in the first place, and so the Unmaintained Free Software Wiki was born.

Few people seem to know about the site though; Jon Corbett at LWN puts it like this:

Unfortunately, this project itself looks like it could benefit from a bit of maintenance. Only seven projects have been added since the beginning of the year, and only two (Gnome Commander and khtml2png) are listed as having been adopted. Perhaps the problem is simply one of awareness; If relatively few people even know that this site exists, few are unlikely to make use of it. If that is the case, then, hopefully, this article will help a bit.

So I’m hoping that this will help spread the word as well. If you like the idea of this then I encourage you to blog about it too and, if you have the skills, enthusiasm and Copious Free Time, take on a project yourself!

Minimum Memory for OpenSolaris ?

Posted on by

Dear Lazyweb,

Alec has been bugging me to try OpenSolaris with ZFS on something (a small laptop he suggested) but I’ve run into problems. My only spare box is an ancient Olivetti Netstrada, about 10 years old with 4 (yes, four) Pentium Pro 200MHz CPUs and a whopping (for its time) 256MB RAM.

Problem is that whilst Linux happily boots and runs on it the two OpenSolaris LiveCD’s I’ve tried (Nexenta and Belenix) both fail. Nexenta says that there’s not enough RAM to unpack the RAM disk (not surprising as their site says it needs 512MB to run) and the Belenix one just leaves the screen in a mess of pretty colours as soon as Grub tries to run the loaded kernel.

Solaris Kernel Crash on Olivetti Netstrada quad 200MHz PPro, 256MB RAM boat anchor

I then tried to boot the Nexenta install CD (they claim it can run in 256MB, though no mention of its installers needs) and got the same pretty pattern of colours when the kernel executed. 🙁

I do have one other PC, the only problem is that’s got even less RAM and the CD drive doesn’t appear to want to open any more, grrr..

WordPress 2.0.5 is out

Posted on by

WordPress have just announced the release of WordPress 2.0.5, you can see the changes at the Trac page for the release.

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.

Congratulations to Ryan Boren on his new baby, Ronan, after whom this release is named!

Update: The upgrade here was painless, nice work folks!. There’s also some more details in this blog post.

Update 2: Brian Layman has asked me to point out that this fixes some serious security problems.

Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” Released

Posted on by

Yay, the latest version (( 6.10, codenamed Edgy Eft )) of Ubuntu (( using the Gnome desktop )), Kubuntu (( using the KDE desktop )), Xubuntu (( using the XFCE desktop )) and Edubuntu (( with support for educational institutions via thin client deployments and educational software )) has landed!

See the release notes for details of where to get it, what’s new, how to update an existing system and a required firmware update for Sun Niagra boxes to fix a Sun hypervisor bug that it can tickle.