Show notes
238 – Linux For The Rest Of Us
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http://sourceforge.net/projects/sonargnulinux/files/
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Help Eric Arduini and family
As some of you may know my brother was diagnosed in February of this year with a rare form of primary liver cancer that is unfortunately terminal. All funds will be donated to him and his family for medical bills and other household bills so that his family can spend the rest of his time with him and not have to stress about money as much during this difficult time.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-eric-arduini-and-family
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Daniel
I am trying fedora 31.
Since I use orca, the screen-reader, I need no monitor. But when the monitor is off, the computer does not want to work. Is there a way to tell fedora not to bother with a monitor?
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Brad’s Emails
Hey Door and Bruce,
We got asked asked a couple of us who use ZFS our opinions on the article about Linus saying “don’t use ZFS.” So I thought I would also share my comments with you guys.
First of all, ZoL and ZoF and all of the other ZFS’ (MS is coming out with a port, and OSX has one, I believe) are using OpenZFS, which is not the same as Oracle ZFS. They took the last open source Sun version of ZFS and forked that. Oracle has since closed their ZFS implementation, so the code in oracle zfs has diverged from the code of OpenZFS. And what’s more, OpenZFS has many of the original Sun developers who invented ZFS for Sun, such as Matt Ahrens, working on the project.
Second, OpenZFS is under the Sun CDDL license, which is an opensource license. The GPL doesn’t play nicely with it, in the same manner as they don’t play nicely with the BSD or MIT or Apache licenses. Because the GPL (especially v3) is as vendor-lock-in-y as the best ms or apl licenses (or oracle, for that matter). So, not being a lawyer, I have to ask if litigous larry can sue a project like linux or freebsd for using an open source project, which openZFS is?
What I would ideally like to see is for someone to put together an OpenZFS foundation. That should be an umbrella organization that could protect anyone from lawsuits. (again, I am not a lawyer).
Also, regarding shared resource clustering, that concept has been around since the late 90s. I remember in 1998 or 1999, Mosix clusters were available. Basically, you had a kernel module that would run on all of your local machines, and donate their spare cycles to anyone with extra load needing more compute power. seti@home or folding@home have also been around for that length of time as well…
–b
Here is an Ars Technica article on Linus’ (and Greg KH’s) comments..It gives a good rundown of the some of the functions that ZFS brings to the table, and where Linus misspoke.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/
Yes…I’m back. I wanted to respond to points you made to my email.
* First, the kernel belongs to Linus. I understand that, and I also understand that he has every right to say yay or nay to what goes into it. I have no problem with that aspect.
* I agree that the oracle lawyers can go after any and everyone, but honestly, if Linus is going to call out ZFS for the stain of oracle, then why doesn’t he also call out BTRFS? That too was an oracle property. In fact, oracle developed BTRFS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs), not just inherited it from Sun. As a matter of fact, does java in Linux violate that rule? After all, oracle is already suing google over it. So if you are going to set up the false dichotomy with ZFS of “why take that chance,” then why take that chance with BTRFS or java?
* BTRFS was Linux’s attempt to match ZFS, only it doesn’t work as well. I have seen demonstrations of multi disk zfs arrays where people would come up, and smash a drive running in the system. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1C6DELK7fc), and it was still running with one drive. They did another experiment where they completely wiped a drive, filled it with zeroes. Unfortunately, BTRFS lost data when the latter test was performed on it. So Linux wants an advanced filesystem, it’s just not there yet, while ZFS is a mature filesystem.
Door, your comment about “who needs ZFS? You may want ZFS but you don’t need ZFS sounds, to me, a lot like the current gun discussions. “You don’t need an AR-15,” or “you don’t need a magazine larger than 10 rounds.” But the people who make this determination know nothing about your lifestyle. The same with ZFS. I mean, my other choices are upload to the proprietary cloud or use a proprietary mass storage device, which should offend your GPL sensibilities. I do have pictures of my kids and grandkids that I want to keep, as well as other data. Invoices, forms, and so forth. Yes, a lot of it is disposable, but there are some things that I want to keep, and I want those as protected as humanly possible. Based on your comments about it “not doing anything spectacular,” I can surmise that you have never looked at it. And if it is because of oracle’s lawyers, see the notes above on BTRFS.
As for the 8GB of RAM in a box, I ran my FreeNAS with ZFS and a GUI middleware layer for a long time on 4GB. And come on, it’s 2020. It should be getting harder to find a machine with less resources than this. Hell, ask Rich. Even RPis and other SBCs ship with at least 4GB of RAM in this day and age.
You said you were a residential person, well, so am I. My personal laptop and my home desktop runs FreeBSD (with ZFS), plus I have a FreeNAS.
Bruce, I use snapshotting both on my laptop and my desktop. I have cron jobs set up that do it automatically. I take snapshots regularly, and they auto fade. So I have over 350 snapshots, and they have saved my bacon on more than one occasion, most recently when firefox crashed, lost it’s mind and lost my tabs with it. So yeah, I will take automated snapshots (which start out at zero length) to be able to roll back a mistake. Yes, I also do backups, but it is much easier to copy a directory from the .zfs directory on the local machine. You speak of mirroring across the network. This is the same thing on the local machine. You can also do what they call zfs send/zfs recv and push the data to other zfs datasets locally or on other machines. It’s like rsyncing, but about 1600 times faster.
There is another advantage to snapshots that you may not have considered. I have been a Unix and Linux sysadmin for almost 26 years. One of the things that you can do with ZFS, having had many system updates go sideways, is to be able to completely roll back if something goes wrong during an upgrade. I have had this happen on FreeBSD and rolled back to the previous boot environment. On Linux, I was stuck manually undoing the broken parts.
Finally, Door, I understand what you are saying about the GPL. The problem is that it is only free for certain values of freedom. According to rms, and his value of freedom, if I decide to sell my software that I wrote, or use proprietary software (like nVidia drivers), or if I modify a piece of GPL software to make it work better, I have to release it as GPL. That is not really freedom… I am the parent of adult children. True freedom includes the freedom to make decisions that I don’t agree with. If I tried to stop them from making bad (in my opinion) decisions, then I would be restricting my freedom. That is why I personally prefer the BSD license. Now having said that, you do have the freedom to use the GPL, and I still do use GPL software. 
Anyhow, sorry this is so long, but I wanted to cover the salient points that you made in response to my first email.
Regards,
–b
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Why East Texas courts are back on “top” for patent lawsuits:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/east-texas-courts-are-back-on-top-for-patent-lawsuits/
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VPNs will change forever with the arrival of WireGuard into Linux
After years of development WireGuard, a revolutionary approach to Virtual Private Networks (VPN) was finally fast-tracked to the Linux kernel. Now, at long last, WireGuard is in Linus Torvald’s code tree. That means WireGuard should appear in the Linux kernel 5.6 release.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/vpns-will-change-forever-with-the-arrival-of-wireguard-into-linux/
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Darknet Diaries
https://darknetdiaries.com/
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The Perfect Scam
https://www.aarp.org/podcasts/the-perfect-scam/
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What happened with the Iowa caucus results? The smartphone app disaster, explained.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/4/21122211/iowa-caucus-smartphone-app-disaster-explaine
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Remmina
Use other desktops remotely, from a tiny screen or large monitors.:
https://remmina.org
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SSHFS
How To Use SSHFS to Mount Remote File Systems Over SSH:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-sshfs-to-mount-remote-file-systems-over-ssh
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