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A sysadmin friend of mine at Oxford just posted the attached in his
LiveJournal; I am forwarding it here for comments, since it swings
between problem definition and rant, and today's Friday.
I have my opinions regarding some of the points raised; I am seeking
breadth of insight. At very least his post raises some communications
issues, and a few technical ones of implementation, and migration
strategy.
URL of original: http://mrod.livejournal.com/211908.html ; Steve has
agreed it's OK for me to post this here, since he's not subscribed...
- alec
> ZFS: How its design seems to be more trouble than its worth.
>
> Now, let me say this first; ZFS seems like a wonderful thing. In
> fact, it is wonderful except for a couple of things, which makes it
> totally undeployable for our new server. Actually, let's put this
> another way. One thing makes it impossible because the ZFS way of
> doing things is mutually exclusive with the way our system (and
> probably a huge number of other legacy systems) works.
>
> The main bugbear is what the ZFS development team laughably call
> quotas. They aren't quotas, they are merely filesystem size
> restraints. To get around this the developers use the "let them eat
> cake" mantra, "creating filesystems is easy" so create a new
> filesystem for each user, with a "quota" on it. This is the ZFS way.
>
> Unfortunately, this causes a number of problems (above the fact
> that there's no soft quota). Firstly, no instead of having only a
> few filesystems mounted you have "system mounts + number of users"
> mounted filesystems, which makes df a pain to use. Secondly,
> there's no way of having a shared directory structure with
> individual users having separate file quotas within it. But
> finally, and this is the critical problem, each user's home
> directory is now a separate NFS share.
>
> At first look that final point doesn't seem to be much of a worry
> until you look at the implications that brings. To cope with a
> distributed system with a large number of users the only managable
> way of handling NFS mounts is via an automounter. The only
> alternative would be to have an fstab/vfstab file holding every
> filesystem any user might want. In the past this has been no
> problem at all, for all your user home directories on a server you
> could just export the parent directory holding all the user home
> directories and put a line "users -rw,intr myserver:/disks/users"
> and it would work happily.
>
> Now, with each user having a separate filesystem this breaks. The
> automounter will mount the parent filesystem as before but all you
> will see are the stub directories ready for the ZFS daughter
> filesystems to mount onto and there's no way of consolidating the
> ZFS filesystem tree into one NFS share or rules in automount map
> files to be able to do sub-directory mounting.
>
> Of course, the ZFS developers would argue that you should change
> the layout of your automounted filesystems to fit with the new
> scheme. This would mean that users' home directories would appear
> directly below /home, say.
>
> The problem here is one of legacy code, which you'll find
> throughout the academic, and probably commercial world. Basically,
> there's a lot of user generated code which has hard coded paths so
> any new system has to replicate what has gone before. (The current
> system here has automount map entries which map new disks to the
> names of old disks on machines long gone, e.g. /home/eeyore_data/ )
>
> The ZFS developers don't seem to see real-world problems, or maybe
> they don't WANT to see them as it would make thier lives more
> complicated. It's far easier to be arrogant and use the "let them
> eat cake" approach rather than engineer a real solution to the
> problem, such as actually programming a true quota system.
>
> As it is, it seems that for our new fileserver I'm going to have to
> back off from ZFS and use the old software device concatenation
> with UFS on top, which is a right pain and not very resilient.
>
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