ZFS needs a zfsdump program for the same reasons that every filesystemneeds a *dump program: you need something that can fully and completelyreproduce the state of the on-disk data, complete with sparse files andweird permissions and so on, and can restore small portions of thebackup not just the whole thing.

(In this day of more and more people turning off atime , it's probably no longer so important tohave a backup tool that is guaranteed not to change the state of files.)

Generalized

I think that you should prewire experimental racks for power. By thisI don't mean just making sure that they have some PDUs in them; I meanrunning actual power cords up the sides, with unconnected ends tiedoff every so often ready to be plugged into machines. If you turn outto need more power cords for a machine, don't try to run more powercables along the side unless they too are going to be permanent; justdangle them down the back, where they are easy to

A modern Unix system carries around with it all sorts of historicalrelics . One of them is /usr/share , whichwas a relic of another era until recently (when multi-architecturemachines started appearing).

Once, by now long ago, disk space was a lot more limitedand heavily NFS dependent networks were much more common . Because disk space was so scarce, youdidn't put big locally-built programs like TeX or Emacs or the latestX Windows on every machine's disk; generally