This is a story, presented as a narrative.

Oh dear, one backup server hasn't finished yetdespite running all night and all (work) day; in fact, Amanda isstill doing three initial full backups of three filesystems on thesingle fileserver this backup serverhandles, and hasn't even started anything else. First thought: is thereanything obviously wrong on the fileserver or the iSCSI backends ? The answer is no; load is low, IO statsare low, the disks do not seem to

A commentator on my entry on GPL'ing ZFS raised a goodissue:

But don't you think it would have been reasonable for Oracle torelicense ZFS upon buying Sun, so they could use it for their ownLinux distributions and wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel andsupport BTRFS development?

In my view, the core issue for Oracle with this is that GPL'ing ZFSgives it to all Linux distributions, not just Oracle's; it's an evengreater gift to all Linux distributions

A commentator on yesterday's entry wrote:

The feature set of Solaris 10, which I thought was quite outstandingfrom an OS point of view at the time, never seemed to gain muchtraction with decision-makers (possibly because they tend not to havean "OS point of view").

Over time I've come around to believing two general things aboutoperating systems (partly as a reaction to dealing with Solaris andreflecting on how I feel about it).

First, operating systems are commodities

In my ruminations on the future of ZFS I calledthe Solaris version of ZFS dead due to the combination of the departureof the original ZFS developers, the (now) closed source nature ofSolaris, and Oracle making Solaris unattractive to people. A commentatortook me to task, noting:

We may not like Oracle, but they can afford developers and I do knowthey are working on ZFS. There are already new features in Solaris11's ZFS that are not in Illumos, like: encryption, new

As I mentioned yesterday , one bit of recentnews was Jonathan Schwartz saying that he regrets not GPL'ing ZFS .Some people may be going 'if only' now, but I take the other view;I don't see how this would have been a good idea for Sun and I don'tthink that GPL'ing ZFS would have been effective by itself at gettingZFS into Linux.

I've written before about the practical difficulties of getting ZFSintegrated into Linux , so I will just summarize

The big news recently has been Jonathan Schwartz saying thathe regrets not GPL'ing ZFS ,on the implied grounds that ZFS being in Linux would have made itrelevant. Setting aside questions about whether or not GPL'ing ZFSwould have worked to get it included in Linux and whether it wouldhave been a good idea for Sun, this leads naturally to thoughtsabout ZFS's future.

ZFS's future is intertwined with the futures of Solaris and Illumos.Solaris's future is entangled with Oracle and so

I recently ran into an odd problem. If I visited a website with myregular Firefox session, it came up fine and normally, but if I tried tovisit it in my testing Firefox I insteadgot a generic advertising page for a VPS provider (the VPS provider thatthe website was hosted on, in fact). Testing now shows that I would havegotten the same results with Chrome or lynx, but that if I had triedthis from work instead of from home, everything would have seen the realwebsite

Suppose that you want to do something N times, for whatever reason. InC, the straightforward and idiomatic way to do this is a for loop;' for (i = 0; i < times; i++) { .... } '. Since Python doesn't have thisform of a for loop, the Python equivalent is a while loop. However,many people would probably say that this isn't idiomatic Python. What Ithink of as the idiomatic Python way to do

There are a fair number of open source Unixes around and over timeI've wound up with some jaundiced perceptions of what their variousecological niches are. Today I feel like writing them up, with thedisclaimer that this is not just in my own view but that it is myview of what perceptions of these Unixes are, not necessarilythe reality.

Linux

Everyone knows this one. Linux's niche is as the popularand widely used open source Unix, and as a result it's the onethat