RedHat Doc updates

The Virtualization Guide for RHEL 5.4 discusses KVM and Xen as opposed to the 5.3 document. The GFS2 doucment has also been updated.

Vixie article on DNS

A friend sent me this Vixie article on DNS. I haven't read it all, but what I read so far is good so I'll link to it and remember to read more later.

Ubuntu 9.10 boot problem

I upgraded my workstation from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. I got the alert dev disk by-uuid does not exist dropping to a shell error. The fix was to use the busybox shell to mount /dev/sda1 (in the case of my system) on /foo and then "chroot /foo /bin/bash". I then updated:

1. /etc/fstab
Replace "UUID=f3920f76-f982-47b0-b2e7-8d6536482b8f" with "dev/sda1"

2. /boot/grub/menu.lst
Replace the UUID with the device as above. I also took out "quiet splash".

I was then able to reboot.

LISA in MD coming soon

I'm wondering if I should attend LISA this year. They're having a storage day that looks relevant too.

Oracle's Sun acquisition, ZFS, BtrFS, ext4

I came across a blog reporting that Apple will not include ZFS in OS X which speculates that Oracle might kill ZFS because it has BtrFS. Another blog speculates that Apple didn't want to get in the middle of a lawsuit; NetApp claims ZFS infringes on their WAFL patent (the more I learn of NetApp the less I like them).

The news above makes me more interested in BtrFS. It's developed by Oracle but GPL'd and there are blogs and articles comparing BtrFS and ZFS. It looks like the next step for GNU/Linux systems which can't have ZFS but need something more advanced than ext4.

For now I welcome ext4 until BtrFS is ready. ext4 is the default file system for Fedora 11 (benefits list), which also has an icantbelieveitsnotbtr option for experimental BtrFS support. I wonder when either will make it to RHEL. ext4 will probably be in RHEL much sooner and I look forward to fast fsck'ing at work (where I have to fsck 1T every now and then).