And now an observation from my nine-year-old on mirrored pools

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scwst

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My kids are curious about the pile of computer parts that has been mutating on the big table in the cellar for the last weeks, and so I've been giving rough overviews of what is going on. This morning, I was explaining how the the data storage consisted of two pairs of disks which are "mirrored" for safety and then put together. Cool, my nine-year-old says: If you have two mirrors facing each other like that, you'll get an endless corridor because there is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.

I'm petty sure that effect is mentioned neither in the slide show nor in the Oracle ZFS Administration guide, but, uh, I'll take another look ...
 

Ericloewe

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Try as I might, I can't find a pilosophical argument to squeeze that into the definition...
 

Jailer

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Heh, your kid just discovered "quantum storage". :D
 

VladTepes

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sweet. Don;t forget us mortals when you;re a bazillionaire !
 

Stux

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My kids are curious about the pile of computer parts that has been mutating on the big table in the cellar for the last weeks, and so I've been giving rough overviews of what is going on. This morning, I was explaining how the the data storage consisted of two pairs of disks which are "mirrored" for safety and then put together. Cool, my nine-year-old says: If you have two mirrors facing each other like that, you'll get an endless corridor because there is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.

I'm petty sure that effect is mentioned neither in the slide show nor in the Oracle ZFS Administration guide, but, uh, I'll take another look ...

So that's how ZFS replication works!
 

Ericloewe

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So that's how ZFS replication works!
It's actually using very advanced quantum sorcery, but since Unix is Unix, everything gets dumped into the decidedly classical standard output, so that people can do Unix things to it like "pipe it through SSH" or "pipe it into a file" or "pipe it straight to zfs recv" or "pipe it into cat and immediately get arrested by the Unix police because why the !%#& would you use cat to view a text file, much less a zfs replication stream".
 
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anodos

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"pipe it into cat and immediately get arrested by the Unix police because why the !%#& would use cat to view a text file, much less a zfs replication stream".
Indeed. I've always found cats to be rather unreliable.

On the whole mirroring into a mirror thing, I once for fun created a subdirectory in a samba share that contained a symlink loop. Apparently tools that walk the file tree of SMB shares don't like that.
 

Ericloewe

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Apparently tools that walk the file tree of SMB shares don't like that.
That's a well-known AI problem. Like all AI problems, it's also an insurance policy for when skynet comes.

It's a good thing this one exists, because Samba is high on the list of software at risk of turning into a sentient AI, mostly due to how messy it is. Given its code, it'll certainly be a crazy AI, possibly bent on world domination, though an obsessive-compulsive fascination with freak shows is also likely.
 

anodos

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That's a well-known AI problem. Like all AI problems, it's also an insurance policy for when skynet comes.

It's a good thing this one exists, because Samba is high on the list of software at risk of turning into a sentient AI, mostly due to how messy it is. Given its code, it'll certainly be a crazy AI, possibly bent on world domination, though an obsessive-compulsive fascination with freak shows is also likely.

At least it's not OpenSSL.

Samba just has a very long legacy. Things have gotten a lot better in samba since samba 4 first came out.

I think three things tend to confound new users: 1 - they expect it to be simple (samba has lots of parts, and is extremely configurable / mis-configurable 2 - they are often unfamiliar with Windows networking, and 3 - accurate documentation is difficult to find.
 

Dice

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It's actually using very advanced quantum sorcery, but since Unix is Unix, everything gets dumped into the decidedly classical standard output, so that people can do Unix things to it like "pipe it through SSH" or "pipe it into a file" or "pipe it straight to zfs recv" or "pipe it into cat and immediately get arrested by the Unix police because why the !%#& would you use cat to view a text file, much less a zfs replication stream".
thanx for the awesome ROFLMAOIA :D
 
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