@Obsolesce said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Kept them up for 2.5 years.
Tf?
Right? One reboot and.... ZFS can't find any drives because ZFS uses ephemeral designations for its drives and has no known way to discover drives once that ephemeral identification is lost. So any random reboot can cause the array to just... vanish, even though ZFS can see all the drives just fine and knows that they are ZFS drives.
@JaredBusch said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
@scottalanmiller said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
It means some random drive delivery guy can do the drive swap without asking.
It means the "dell" or "hp" tech that is just a random contractor can swap the drive under the warranty support wihtout needing us to deal with anything more than checking that the autorebuild started in the controller.
Right. Not something I recommend doing, ever. Because that's the same people who pull the wrong drive or the right drive from teh wrong server. It's a great idea, and that's why we normally do it for really small shops. But it carries a lot of dangers of its own because it encourages people to make big hardware changes without asking.
Seen a LOT of data loss causes by making this seem like a good idea.
@JaredBusch said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
@scottalanmiller said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
In general, I actually think this is a negative. Making systems that are "easy for people who don't know what they are doing to pretend that they do" is one of the biggest causes of problems I find in customer systems.
No one knows how to use MD or ZFS. Instead they go to Google-sensei.
End users, sure. Sales people, sure. But if you have an IT team, you are good to go. Having to pay hundreds of dollars for lower reliability, lower performance solutions to allow shops without IT to pretend to keep themselves safe is a penalty for people who don't want skilled labor. But overall, just hiring an IT team or having a qualified IT department makes far more sense. You get more protection and often actually costs less. There's no shortage of IT people.
I'm a huge believer in doing a good job and if the customer screws up not caring, that's on them. But intentionally doing a bad just assuming the customer is an idiot makes it my fault.
@JaredBusch said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
I use it because it is more easily understood and supported by the majority.
In general, I actually think this is a negative. Making systems that are "easy for people who don't know what they are doing to pretend that they do" is one of the biggest causes of problems I find in customer systems.
"Oh, I thought I could just change how these things work and..." now they have no backups, no they are offline, now their data is corrupt, etc. etc.
The appearance of being accessible without knowledge encourages the Jurassic Park Effect.
@JaredBusch said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
I don't use it (hardware raid) because it is better, I use it because it is more easily understood and supported by the majority.
When non-IT people need to interact, it's better. That's why we use it. We don't want customers thinking that they can do stuff without IT and causing damage. It means we can send a middle schooler in to change drives without needing to coordinate on the timing. It means some random drive delivery guy can do the drive swap without asking.
It costs a lot more. It lowers performance. But the blind swap value for customers without someone technical making sure random people aren't touching servers when they aren't supposed to is a big deal.
However, all those non-technical people are still hitting the power button, pulling cables, spilling coffee... so I don't know if it has ever protected us, lol.
@JaredBusch said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
Software raid is bespoke.
That's true in the case of ProxMox with ZFS, because ZFS isn't native nor stable on that platform nor is there any team that makes that work. It's a product from one world shoehorned to allowed it to run (possibly in license violation) in another and there is no official support, testing, or anything from any vendor or team.
But MD is way, way the opposite. MD is as enterprise and anti-bespoke as it gets. It's part of the base OS, it is the most reliable RAID system out there.
Technically, using a third party external hardware replacement for the OS' own tooling is far more bespoke than using MD internally.
@Obsolesce said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Also, today is yet another day of slowly and expensively helping a company recover both their ProxMox and TrueNAS deployments that were done on ZFS and all was lost and no vendor had any means of recovering anything.
Did they back up their PRoxMox to their TruNAS and they both went under?
no, no backups. Data was all stored on TrueNAS. TrueNAS was stored on ProxMox. "ZFS is so reliable you don't need backups" was the idea, I guess. And no hardware failed. Just ZFS failed. Pure software failure. All hardware is pristine and working great. But ZFS just lost... everything due to internal design fragility that makes it prone to data loss on reboot.
Original IT company seems to have known this and disabled all reboots. Kept them up for 2.5 years. First reboot after going live resulted in total data loss because ZFS on Linux isn't expected to reliably survive reboots in that way!
@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@Obsolesce said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Also, today is yet another day of slowly and expensively helping a company recover both their ProxMox and TrueNAS deployments that were done on ZFS and all was lost and no vendor had any means of recovering anything.
Did they back up their PRoxMox to their TruNAS and they both went under?
Or the ghost story of IT deployments.
ProxMox with main storage on TruNAS... ooooooOOOOOOo scary!
NO! Worse. TrueNAS on top of ProxMox. So ZFS on top of ZFS!!
All the ZFS cultists are so ready to say why you can't do ZFS on top of hardware RAID to try to discredit hardware RAID (when in reality, it is ZFS that is unstable) that they ignore that doing it on top of ANY other system would have the exact same results. So they miss that ZFS on top of ZFS is far, far worse than ZFS on top of something stable.
So the level of disaster is incredible. All teh complexity, all the fragility of ZFS (TWICE) and no ZFS advantages because it is stripped away by the encapsulation of the ZFS by the other ZFS system.
macOS Sonoma 14 has released this morning. Mac users can update now. I'm just about to kick off the update myself.
https://www.apple.com/macos/sonoma/
No major features that I would call important in any way. but lots of little things.
Also, today is yet another day of slowly and expensively helping a company recover both their ProxMox and TrueNAS deployments that were done on ZFS and all was lost and no vendor had any means of recovering anything.
@GUIn00b said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
hating ZFS more and more each day, lol
I've quickly discovered there is a fervent populus of ZFS defenders and apologists. It reminds me of the RAID-5 knife fights ....err I mean discussions
You sure do know how to pick a nemesis, SAM
More they picked one with me. I've been a storage and filesystem expert since before ZFS released and the ZFS team worked on the original SAM-SD design with me. The Cult of ZFS people literally picked a fight with me and the ZFS team ten years after this stuff was old hat, lol.
@travisdh1 said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
They've completely bought into the cult of ZFS and the Windows world of "software RAID is bad".
It's weird because they push software RAID, just not good software RAID that's baked in. Only software RAID from a system that isn't native nor stable on Linux. Ugh.
@GUIn00b said in ProxMox Storage Configuration Question (idk how lol):
I thought I was going to mdadm a RAID-10. Nope! AAaaaand Proxmox seems to have "ZOMG USE ZFS" all over their documentation, and I'm not interested in that if there are other options
The only way I'd use it is either manually creating a RAID array with MD and not telling ProxMox, lol. But that's kludgy. Or do things the ProxMox way and use a hardware RAID controller.
ProxMox isn't stable with ZFS (ZFS is not stable on Linux and we know exactly why) and ProxMox ignores this and leaves the user at risk. But almost no one deploys Proxmox that way so it is rarely an issue.
But like VMware, officially there is no software RAID option that is production capable. Sucks because MD would do a great job here.
@GUIn00b said in Practical RAID Decision Making:
I guess it would have to be a very specific concern to opt for the parity overhead in favor of the "added protection" over a statistically very rare potential failure scenario of 4-drive RAID-10.
It's a specific failure scenario that even when it happens, there's no way to know if the same scenario would have been protected under RAID 6 because most scenarios where RAID 10 would fail, RAID 6 would also fail during its recovery mode (nearly 100%.) But the chances that it would face that recovery scenario are higher.
The complexity comes from choosing single unpredictable failure scenarios. After a failure has occurred, if we had the ability to pick how to have protected against it in the past, yes, RAID 6 would be chosen sometimes. There's a known example to explain why you can't use this in real life. It's the seatbelt problem.
Seatbelts save lives. On average, by far, wearing a seatbelt protects you. But there are special cases where the seatbelt can be what causes you to die. Yet statically, you never skip wearing a seatbelt because it is a one in a million chance that the seatbelt will cause a death rather than preventing one. And at the time that you choose to wear or not to sear wear your seatbelt you have no idea which type of accident you will have.
So we know that wearing the seatbelt is the safer bet. Seatbelts are like RAID 10. You can't know how things will go wrong, and in this scenario, RAID 10 protects you much more often than RAID 6 does.
@GUIn00b said in Practical RAID Decision Making:
Though both RAID levels can sustain 2 drive failures, the caveat with RAID-10 is as long as it's not the same member from each mirrored set. With RAID-6, ANY 2 drives could fail and still be operational and recoverable. I guess it would have to be a very specific concern to opt for the parity overhead in favor of the "added protection" over a statistically very rare potential failure scenario of 4-drive RAID-10.
Even then, statistically RAID 6 is much more dangerous. RAID 10 has a reliability rating so high that it never matters, RAID 6 does not. RAID 6 has a rebuild time hundreds of times longer than RAID 10; and it has 300% higher URE risks during a rebuild (that is chance of hitting one in a four drive scenario).
Remember the rule of thumb in determining RAID risk: always ignore the false security of "how many drives can you lose." That's not what matters. That's one of many factors, and almost never a significant one, in determining actual risk. URE risks are orders of magnitude more significant and factors like rebuild intensity and rebuild time make "chances to lose another disk" generally more significant than "how many disks can you stand to lose."
At four drives, I know of no scenario where RAID 6 is faster or more reliable than RAID 10. It's always worse. At 5+ drives it starts to have capacity advantages that once in a while make it a good choice. But the rule is at four drives, RAID 6 is a "never" because it's slower and riskier without any offsetting benefits.
@Obsolesce said in Can you run a Windows desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinary Software?:
@PhlipElder said in Can you run a Windows desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinary Software?:
If the product says it can run on Windows 10 or 11 and falls under the 20 connection limit then go for it but with one caveat: Make sure the hardware has ECC memory to avoid a memory flipped bit error that can wreak havoc and at least a RAID 1 array between two SATA SSDs.
No, the 20 connection limit ONLY applies to the built-in Windows file and print services. File sharing and printing (leaving out IIS and the others as they don't apply).
That is exactly NOT AVImark Veterinary Software.
What you said to do is undeniable theft.
More importantly, a third party has no authority to override your agreement with Microsoft.
@PhlipElder said in Can you run a Windows desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinary Software?:
If the product says it can run on Windows 10 or 11 and falls under the 20 connection limit then go for it
So if a third party says you can steal from a bank, go for it? Because Avimark has zero, literally zero, say in what you can legally do in your contract with Microsoft.
With that logic, why ask Avimark at all, why not ask your aunt or some kid on the street? Why pay for any license for anything, ever? Just ask someone who isn't involved and ask them if it is okay to steal from someone else and if you don't like the answer, ask random people until you get the answer you want.
Why bother asking anyone? Just treat yourself as the third party and ask yourself. Voila.
@Mario-Jakovina said in Can you run a Windows desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinary Software?:
Volkswagen and Audi cars also have very much in common under the hood, but they are not same products.
If the difference between the two products is in the license and only in the license and it is the license that unlocks the features... they are the same product. VW and Audi by law must be different products, made in different places. They can share a lot, but are different vehicles. Windows 11 and 2022 are literally the same product and the difference is the license.
@CCWTech said in Can you run a desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinaty Software?:
And, again, this is very commonly discussed among experts. Windows 10/11 have a 20 device limit for connections. Clearly, MS had multiple PCs accessing it in mind.
This is like saying that a bank has 10 teller stations so clearly unlimited people are allowed to steal from the vault.
Allowing one type of access in a limited fashion in no way implies something unrelated is also allowed. What kind of logic do they teach at university these days? An eight year old should have no issue with this. It's SO basic.
@Obsolesce said in Can you run a desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinaty Software?:
@CCWTech seems super clear to me, and always has been:
The most important bit is "only the following features" of which, AviMark, is not one of them. Personal or internal doesn't matter at that point, as it isn't a feature allowed.
The number of devices allowed to use AviMark remotely from it is exactly: zero.
