Allan’s recap of the ZFS User conference, first impressions of OmniOS by a BSD user, Nextcloud 13 setup on FreeBSD, OpenBSD on a fanless desktop computer, an intro to HardenedBSD, and DragonFlyBSD getting some SMP improvements.

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ZFS User Conference Recap


Attendees met for breakfast on the fourth floor, in a lunchroom type area just outside of the theatre. One entire wall was made of lego base plates, and there were buckets of different coloured lego embedded in the wall.
The talks started with Matt Ahrens discussing how the 2nd most requested feature of ZFS, Device Removal, has now landed, then pivoting into the MOST requested feature, RAID-Z expansion, and his work on that so far, which included the first functional prototype, on FreeBSD.
Then our friend Calvin Hendryx-Parker presented how he solves all of his backup headaches with ZFS. I provided him some helpful hints to optimize his setup and improve the throughput of his backups
Then Steven Umbehocker of OSNEXUS talked about their products, and how they manage large numbers of ZFS nodes
After a very nice lunch, Orlando Pichardo of Micron talked about the future of flash, and their new 7.5TB SATA SSDs. Discussion of these devices after the talk may lead to enhancements to ZFS to better support these new larger flash devices that use larger logical sector sizes.
Alek Pinchuk of Datto talked about Pool Layout Considerations
then Tony Hutter of LLNL talked about the release process for ZFS on Linux
Then Tom Caputi of Datto presented: Helping Developers Help You, guidance for users submitting bug reports, with some good and bad examples
Then we had a nice cocktail party and dinner, and stayed late into the night talked about ZFS
The next day, Jervin Real of Percona, presented: ZFS and MySQL on Linux, the Sweet Spots. Mostly outlining some benchmark they had done, some of the results were curious and some additional digging may turn up enhancements that can be made to ZFS, or just better tuning advice for high traffic MySQL servers.
Then I presented my ZSTD compression work, which had been referenced in 2 of the previous talks, as people are anxious to get their hands on this code.
Lastly, Eric Sproul of Circonus, gave his talk: Thank You, ZFS. It thanked ZFS and its Community for making their companies product possible, and then provided an update to his presentation from last year, where they were having problems with extremely high levels of ZFS fragmentation. This also sparked a longer conversation after the talk was over.
Then we had a BBQ lunch, and after some more talking, the conference broke up.



Initial OmniOS impressions by a BSD user


I had been using FreeBSD as my main web server OS since 2012 and I liked it so much that I even contributed money and code to it. However, since the FreeBSD guys (and gals) decided to install anti-tech feminism, I have been considering to move away from it for quite some time now.

As my growing needs require stronger hardware, it was finally time to rent a new server. I do not intend to run FreeBSD on it. Although the most obvious choice would be OpenBSD (I run it on another server and it works just fine), I plan to have a couple of databases running on the new machine, and database throughput has never been one of OpenBSD's strong points. This is my chance to give illumos another try. As neither WiFi nor desktop environments are relevant on a no-X11 server, the server-focused OmniOS seemed to fit my needs.

My current (to be phased out) setup on FreeBSD is:



apache24 with SSL support, running five websites on six domains (both HTTP and HTTPS)
a (somewhat large) Tiny Tiny RSS installation from git, updated via cronjob
sbcl running a daily cronjob of my Web-to-RSS parser
an FTP server where I share stuff with friends
an IRC bouncer
MariaDB and PostgreSQL for some of the hosted services



I would not consider anything of that too esoteric for a modern operating system. Since I was not really using anything mod_rewrite