haute

True. FreeBSD v8 is only at v13 for ZFS.

I forgot to add the most important feature: Snap shots.

At this point, FreeNAS is not talking to our LDAP, nor our AD correctly. On the LDAP side of things, we have a slightly non-standard LDAP setup, which can cause issues with clients that don't use the pam_ldap auth module from PADL software. On the AD side, FreeNAS sometimes needs to be "massaged" to get it to hook up to AD. I don't have a link in front of me, but there are a few known issues with FreeNAS' AD binding setup. In order for us to get it to work, we'd have to do some hackery. Possibly, but we haven't fully investigated FreeBSD. The closest we have come is FreeNAS, and given FreeNAS' AD issues, I can assume those issues exist in the parent OS as well. We are after zpooling, zraid, dedup. LVM just seems so cantankerous in my experience. Plus, I don't know what the performance is like compared to ZFS. Another department went Solaris/ZFS/EqualLogic and are very, very happy, but we do not have the money to pay for a Solaris support contract from Oracle. Ya, saw that myself. The other thing is it is based on OpenSolaris which means the LDAP implementation does not fit our environment.

Sorry for the radio silence, everyone. I have been out of town on a small vacation since Thrs. I will reply to what I can.

I took a look at btrfs. Unfortunately, it looks to be far too immature to implement in a production research environment. It doesnt even have a working implementation of fsck at this point... Otoh, it does look promising for the future, just not at this point in time.

Main Page - WPKG | Open Source Software Deployment and Distribution All you'll ever need. We have it deployed throughout our faculty and are helping the rest of the university deploy it in a federated manner. You dont even need to know much xml, as most packages for major pieces of software are already written.

The trouble is that not all servers involved in the chain of authentication are under our control, so UID/GID mapping can get a little convoluted. I suppose we could use LVM, but honestly, I havent looked into it as I have tried to steer us towards ZFS. Never heard of it until now. I will take a look! Yes, we need the capability of making the file system for user homes transparently extensible. That was the main reason for choosing ZFS; zpool add and you're off to the races. So, if we ever ran out of space on our EqualLogic, we can just buy another one, provision another iSCSI device off of it and add it to the zpool on the server.

We thought about it briefly, but ZFS on Linux is actually run via FUSE and the performance is *cough* less-than-stellar. Further to that, we have had a lot of trouble binding Linux clients to our AD and mapping the UIDs/GIDs for any UNIX resource to those of the Windows equivalent.

Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately, all of them are paid for options, and we need to implement something which is OSS/GPL/CDDL. The VSS option appears to only to NIS/AD UID/GID mapping in the paid for version, which doesnt help anyway as we dont have NIS.... If we could find a detailed how-to using OpenIndiana, that might be acceptable, but since OpenSolaris has all but tanked, documentation for such a thing is almost non-existent.

Hello! Hopefully, there are people around these parts who can help out. I am an admin in the Comp Sci dept at a medium-sized university, and we have just recently started a storage infrastructure upgrade. We have been using a NetApp for the last few years, and we have finally had enough of it tanking all time along with NetApp's thoroughly asinine stance where they "do not support CIFS from Linux". Since we have an uneven split of our desktops (20% Windows, 80% Linux), we need to support CIFS (from Windows and Linux) and NFSv4 from Linux in order to provision home spaces for our faculty and grad students. We purchased a Dell EqualLogic last year for our VMWare infrastructure, and are now in the position of having to build a server which can be a ubiquitous file server using the EqualLogic for its file system. Since this needs to be an extensible setup, we came to the conclusion of needing/wanting to use ZFS. That way, should we need more space to use via another EqualLogic, we can just add it to our zpool and be on our merry way. The other caveat is that snapshots under Linux with the EqualLogic are a no-go, so ZFS ftw again in that respect. The trouble we are having is we dont know how to go about setting up a heterogenous home space server with snapshots where clients access their data from both CIFS/NFS seamlessly and are auth'd against Active Directory on the Windows side, and LDAP on the Linux side, and all UID's/GID's are correctly mapped (all usernames are exactly the same on each side, btw). Here is what we have looked into so far: 1) OpenIndiana - no paid support, and a fairly convoluted setup. Not only that, any version of Solaris has a very narrow implementation of LDAP authentication, so we'd have to somehow shoe-horn it to communicate with our campus LDAP. Aside from that, we cannot get paid support at any point should we need it, or be able to afford it. 2) Nexenta - absolutely no LDAP support which will work with our campus LDAP, and no build environment installed on it, so we couldnt even build pam_ldap if we wanted to. Couple that with the fact Nexenta's virtual NICs do no work with iSCSI in VMWare ESXi (where we are creating the server), this is no longer an option. We were actually told by them that if we implemented an LDAP integration which wasnt theirs, we would not be supported b/c our system would be non-standard. Fail. 3) OpenFiler - no ZFS. No NFSv4. Fail. 4) Windows 2008 R2 w/ Services for UNIX - requires an NIS server for UID/GID mappings from Linux to Windows. Our campus NIS server holds no authentication credentials, so that kills this project. NTFS over ZFS? No way. 5) FreeNAS - LDAP? Check. AD? Check. ZFS? Check. NFSv4? Check. Do LDAP and AD actually work? No. *sigh* 6) Solaris - $$$ which we cannot afford. 7) OpenSolaris - cannot be used for production purposes, LDAP... The trouble is right now, we have zero budget, and the possibility of paying for something which is a solution is non-existent. Our faculty is facing a massive budgetary shortfall (in the millions) due to funding cuts, so we have to find something which is literally a drop-in replacement for our NetApp. If anyone can point us to something which can get us off the ground, we'd be *very* appreciative, b/c we've spent literally months banging on each of the list above here, and each one has a major fault. TIA!