[natebc]

A great deal. Which is why my cringe reflex still activates when I read about people running ZFS in places that aren't super tightly configured. ZFS is just such a massively complex piece of software.

There were legitimate bugs in ZFS that we hit. Mostly around ZIL/SLOG and L2ARC and the umpteen million knobs that one can tweak.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Customers blowing off their feet with ZFS because they felt the need to tweak tunables they didn’t need to use, or didn’t properly understand, is not the fault of ZFS though.

You can do the same with just about any file system. In the Windows world you can blow your feet off with NTFS configuration too.

Of course there have been bugs, but every filesystem has had data-impacting bugs. Redundancy and backups are a critical caveat for all file systems for a reason. I once heard it said that “you can always afford to lose the data you don’t have backed up”. I do not think that broadly applies (such as with individuals), but it certainly applies in most business contexts.

[natebc]

Yeah, my reaction to it usually that's so quickly recommended so frequently for general use.

Obviously there's footguns in everything. Filesystem ones are just especially impactful.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Yep. I use ZFS at home, but on business oriented NAS hardware with drives to match (generally). And I don’t go asking it to do odd things or configure it bizarrely. I don’t pass through drives named with Linux names (I prefer WWN to PCI address naming, at least at home). Etc.

But a lot of people out there will slap a bunch of USB 2.0 hard drives on top of an old gaming computer. I’m all for experimenting, and I sympathize that it’s expensive to run ZFS on “ZFS class” platforms and hardware. I don’t begrudge others that.

It would be really nice if there was something like ZFS that was a tad more flexibility and right in the kernel with consistent and concise user space tooling. Not everyone is comfortable with DKMS.

[motorest]

> A great deal. Which is why my cringe reflex (...)

Can you provide some specifics? So far all I see is vague complains with no substance, and when complainers are lightly pressed they go defensive.

[natebc]

I don't have specifics for how many people running a fork of ZFS on Linux (or the fork for opensolaris, nexenta, etc) have copy-pasted some configuration from a wiki/forum/stackexchange and resulted in a pool that's misconfigured in some subtly fatal way. I don't have any personal anecdotes to share about my own homelab or enterprise IT experience with ZFS because I don't use it at home and nowhere I've worked in IT has used it.

I did live specific situations over several years in a support engineer role where a double digit percentage of customers in enterprise configurations that ended up somewhere between terrible performance and catastrophic data loss due to the misunderstood configuration of a very complex piece of software.

If you wanna use ZFS, use ZFS. I'm not the internets crusader against it. I have no doubt there's thousands of PB out there of perfectly happy, well configured and healthy zpools. It has some truely next-gen features that are extremely useful. I've just seen it recommended so, so many times as a panacea when something simpler would be just as safe and long lasting.

It's kinda like using Kubernetes to run a few containers. Right?

[motorest]

> I don't have specifics (...). I don't have any personal anecdotes (...).

I see.

> I did live specific situations over several years in a support engineer role where a double digit percentage of customers in enterprise configurations that ended up somewhere between terrible performance and catastrophic data loss due to the misunderstood configuration of a very complex piece of software.

I'm sorry, but this claim is outright unbelievable. If the project was even half as unstable as you claim to be, no one would ever use it in production at all. Either you are leaving out critical details such as non-standard patches and usages that have no relationship with real world usage, or you are fabricating tales.

Also, it's telling that no one stepped forward to offer any concrete details and specifics on these hypothetical issues. Makes you think.

[natebc]

Well, I assure you I'm not making it up. If you can't believe that people will misconfigure complicated systems that almost no single person can completely understand or that working in the storage industry exposes you to bizarre and interesting failures of both hardware and software (and firmware!) then I'm not sure what I can say to have you take a story at face value.

I'm not being melodramatic. You can take a story or leave it. I'm not here to convince you one way or another.

And frankly I don't particularly appreciate being called a liar, btw. Nice use of quoting also. Good day.