I’ve been working up a long, formulated post about the Transportation Security Administration’s new ogle or grope security choice (either backscatter “naked” x-ray or enhanced “get your hands off my junk” pat down)… and then I saw this on fark.com, and I knew there was nothing else I needed to write.

(Somebody who thinks the TSA regulations are NOT just security theater, please explain to the logic of this…)

Yay! All my data has been migrated, and the pool contents balanced out over the VDEVs, so I should be running at optimal performance. All that is left is running through my weekly cronjobs to make sure that nothing misfires (like my weekly scrubs). This is a major victory for me! I’ve actually upgraded the server, on time and under budget.

But in doing so, I discovered something irritating about ZFS that I really should have known. When you have a pool made of VDEVs of different sizes, the VDEVs all fill at the same rate, not proportionally to their size. That is, if you have a 2 TB VDEV and a 1 TB VDEV, and you write 600 GB of data, 300 GB goes to each VDEV, not 400 GB to the 2 TB VDEV and 200 GB to the 1 TB.

Yes, this makes sense in many ways, as it won’t bais the pool to a specific VDEV, but it also means that after I write a little over 1 TB of extra data, I’m going to be down to the 2 TB VDEVs – so I’ll have two disks worth of IOPS again, not 4.

You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Looks like I spoke too soon.

No, there’s nothing wrong with the system now that it’s upgraded to Oracle’s Solaris 11 Express… other than the fact that the pool is incredibly imbalanced. I moved all the data from my 5 disk RAIDZ to a a striped set of 2TB drives. I then removed the RAIDZ, added two more drives to mirror the stripe, and scrubbed the pool. No errors, so everything transferred OK. Finally, I took the old 750’s, and added 4 of them to the new pool, as a pair of mirrored pairs.

The trouble is all of the data is on the 2TB drives (the original set of pairs), and the 750s are empty. Which further means all I/O transactions are served from that original pair. It’s better than it was before, when all the drives were in a single top level VDEV, but now that I have 4 top level VDEVs, it’s not acceptable.

So, I’m running a bunch of zfs send | zfs recv statements, and they will likely take all day today. While they are running, the pool is pretty saturated in terms of I/O bandwidth as well as IOPS, and I cant actually use any of the services, as I’d be changing the old data, and then I’d have to remember to resync it anyway. So, tomorrow! When, of course, I’m back at work and back into the daily routine, which leaves little time for playing with media.

root@vault:~# zfs list tank
NAME  USED   AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
tank  2.17T  2.73T  34K    /tank

“Measure twice, cut once.”

That only works if you know exactly what you are trying to build beforehand. I plotted and planned and thought about my computer desk for weeks if not months before driving down to the local hardware store, getting the wood and actually starting on the project. When it came down to it, I scrapped all the plans I’d drawn up, reworked the idea in my head quickly, and started cutting and building. The end result isn’t perfect, but it works, and it’s better than the card table I had been using.

I’m now getting that feeling with the bookshelves that I need to make to put on top of the desk. I have all these elaborate plans in my head, but when it comes down to it, it’s time to just get it done. There’s a point at which you have to cut free and just start doing something. Shipping is a feature.

Nothing like practice to get better, right? I’ve been focusing a lot close-up portraits recently, and I think I’ve got a number of really good ones. For those of you behind country-wide firewalls, this is probably worth checking out.

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5175853947/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5175849289/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5155959435/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5155934777/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5147768454/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5147157757/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5147757872/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5147155371/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5147749148/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5147139879/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5147731018/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/breandandezendorf/5171034952/

Sorry for the list of links. I’ve been fighting with the image embed part of WordPress, and I gave up. I’ll deal with that later.

Apparently, the Obama administration is:

reviewing an Australian program that will allow Internet service providers to alert customers if their computers are taken over by hackers and could limit online access if people don’t fix the problem.

As much as I think it’s probably a service that has the customer in mind, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Once the power to let the government mandate disconnection from the internet for a single, arbitrary reason, however legitimate, I fear what happens when Hollywood pays enough politicians enough cash for them to say “yeah, we’ll disconnect anyone using BitTorrent, and we’ll file suit against them for Hollywood.” Think it won’t happen? A Georgia university is now calling the police on it’s students every time they catch one using P2P – legal content or not. Hollywood has asked in the past for the ability to remotely destroy the computers of alleged file sharers.

I’d much rather see an Internet run by Curious Yellow than by any government.