Feb 022018
 

On occasions, I have run into issues where mounting a filesystem from /etc/fstab fails on a reboot because it depends on something else happening first. The easiest example to recall is when mounting a conventional filesystem constructed from a ZPool block device – the block device isn’t ready until ZFS has finished starting which often occurs after the filesystem mounts are attempted.

The fix is dead simple; just add the option “_netdev” to the options field in /etc/fstab and the problem is sorted :-

/dev/zvol/pool1/vol-splunk      /opt/splunk     ext2    noatime,_netdev         0 2

Yes the reason I am using a block device is that Splunk doesn’t support being installed on a ZFS filesystem.

Sep 012016
 

One of the advantages that ZFS brings, is that it is so easy to create file systems, that you can create them for purposes that you would not previously do. For example, I have an additional file system mounted under my home directory for a certain application that generates a lot of data that I do not need backed up. Because the script I use to back up stuff does not cross file system boundaries (i.e. it does not descend into a directory that contains a mounted file system), I can simply exclude a large amount of frequently changing data by making a file system.

Or I might (as it happens I do not, but I could well do) create file systems for large lumps of data to easily see how much space they occupy – perhaps ~/Pictures. You can run a command like du -sh ~/Pictures, but that is an expensive command (it takes a while) and it tells you how large the files are; not how much space they occupy on disk. And on-disk compression can make that a significant difference! So simply run df -h ~/Pictures if that directory is on a separate file system.

But there is a bit of a gotcha with that. If you create such file systems in the normal way (such as zfs create pool/mikes-pictures; zfs set mountpoint=/home/mike/Pictures pool/mikes-pictures) you risk creating a situation that may prevent your home directory from mounting. If the “child” file system is mounted before the parent, it will not be possible for the parent file system to be mounted when booting.

Instead create the hierarchy properly :-

zfs create pool/h2
mkdir /h2
zfs set mountpoint=/h2 pool/h2
zfs create pool/h2/mike
zfs create pool/h2/mike/Pictures
ls /h2/mike/Pictures

You will also have to fix the permissions, but this is a far safer way of organising things suitable for future file system creation.

damascus-unix-prompt

Jan 122014
 

Computers have gotten faster … a lot faster. In some cases there is never enough speed, but to a certain extent today’s computers are not noticeably faster than computers of a few years ago. At least not if you do not run benchmarks. So there is little incentive to upgrade that 5 year old desktop machine – unless you are running Windows XP of course (support for which will be dropped soon).

Unless of course you look at aspects other than simple speed – such as reliability.

A few years ago I used to run old Unix workstations in preference to PCs despite their lack of speed, because they were simply more reliable – I could leave a workstation running for weeks without any negative effects. Whereas the PCs I was used to using were just not quite as stable; every so often something unexpected would occur and a reboot would be necessary. Usually at the most irritating possible time.

We expect computers to be reliable, but are all too often disappointed.

Desktop manufacturers may be able to revive the flagging market for desktops by offering something new – desktops with reliability. There are a number of reliability features that are commonly found in servers that could be offered in desktops with only a marginal increase in cost.

Error Correcting Code Memory

Forget the “code” part in the title; without going into a great deal of technical detail, ECC memory automatically corrects memory errors when they occur. And occur they do.

There are a variety of causes of bit errors within memory varying from cosmic rays to atmospheric radiation; the cause does not matter so much. What matters is how frequently they occur. According to small studies and theory, they should be quite rare, but Google have released a paper actually measuring the error rate in a large pool of machines; the error rate is roughly about 5 single bit errors in 8 Gigabytes of RAM per hour.

If true, that’s more than enough to have a significant impact on the reliability of your average desktop PC. If a piece of software has some random instructions changed into something else, it will usually crash or do something strange to your data. Or if that random memory error occurs within your data, then you might expect a strange coloured blob to appear in your favourite photo.

Normal desktop PCs do not come supplied with ECC memory because it is slightly more expensive than ordinary memory. Without going into details, ECC memory uses additional memory to maintain a check on the contents of main memory.

And that costs more. Not a lot more, but in a competitive market, a small saving may lead to increased sales. Of course there are other ways to increase sales – such as by making a feature of ECC memory and reliability.

Storage

We are currently in a transition period between mechanical storage (disks) and electronic mass storage (flash). Flash storage currently offers very fast storage but with a price tag attached meaning it is infeasible for large amounts of storage. That will of course change.

In the meantime we have to deal with two storage solutions; one with a reputation of unreliability (flash) and one that is really unreliable (disks). Both fail with regrettable regularity (although discs will fail more often!) but fail in different ways. Disks themselves are likely to have a short period where they do not work very well before refusing to do anything, although as mechanical devices they can fail in surprising ways too! Flash will tend to fail in a rather nice way – it will get to the point where all attempts to write will fail, but all of the information is still readable.

Because they fail in different ways, we have to cope with their failure in different ways too. Except for the most obvious thing – everything needs to be backed up. And of course getting a backup mechanism up and running is a pretty tedious task.

It would make a great deal of sense for a vendor to offer a cloud-based disaster recovery backup for your system disk(s). An account with a copy of the system disk image is created before your system is shipped. And once on line, your desktop PC sends updates to that image in the cloud. And when the disk fails, you can ask the vendor to ship a replacement disk with almost everything you previously had already put in place.

On a more general note, it is worth mentioning that most consumer hard disks at the bottom end of the market are complete rubbish. And I would pay extra to buy disks from a vendor that :-

  1. Takes ordinary disks and burns them in for a week to verify that they are not going to go bad in the first few months; there’s a NAS vendor (whose name escapes me for the moment) that does this and has one of the lowest disk failure rates on the market despite using relatively cheap and nasty disks.
  2. Ships them in proper packaging that absorbs the shipping bumps and knocks. Just because a disk drive looks intact does not mean it is safe to use.

 And What About The File System?

So far it has all been about the hardware, but there is more we can do about reliability in software too. And carrying on from the previous section, one of those areas is how the operating system stores files on disks.  The software module that does this is (to use the Unix or Linux term) the file system and there are different kinds.

Historically different file systems have assumed that the storage is perfectly reliable. However with the increased awareness of silent data corruption, there are now a few file systems that check for silent data corruption – including what is probably the first: ZFS.

Even if there is a small loss of performance, file systems should detect silent data corruption and correct if possible.

Preparing To Fail

We all know that software is unreliable; to be precise it is not perfectly reliable as it is a great deal more reliable than we give it credit for. After all we only notice the failures; and some of the failures at that.

Rather than trying just to produce reliable software, programmers should be designing software that fails safe without losing any data. See crash-only software.

Oct 132013
 

I discovered this cool feature of Linux quite by accident. zRAM is a block device (i.e. a “disk”) where the contents are compressed and stored in memory, which makes it sound rather mundane and hardly very interesting. However in use, it does appear to be quite nifty; sufficiently so that Google are enabling it for Chrome OS. So why?

The way that it is usually configured is as a swap space … so in effect, zRAM is used to compress normal memory, trading processor utilisation for more memory. What should happen is that instead of hitting the performance brick wall of suddenly paging to disk when you hit the memory limits of your machine, the zRAM is used instead eating a bit of processor time but with any luck keeping everything within memory rather than going to disk. It should have no effect during normal operation, but during temporary surges of memory utilisation, it should allow things to proceed at more or less normal performance.

That’s the theory anyway; but if it were not the case would Google be enabling it by default?

Of course in addition to using it as a swap device, there are other possible uses for zRAM devices :-

  1. As an L2ARC cache device for those using ZFS.
  2. To use as a block device for very hot disk spots in examples such as Exim’s retry database – which can be safely discarded on reboot.
  3. Or any other cache whose contents can be safely discarded at any point.

The last point is worth remembering. Because zRAM devices are contained within main memory, their contents are discarded when the power goes away.

Configuration

To use zRAM, we need to load the zRAM module, and choose how many devices to make at the same time. Some people believe that it makes sense to create as many devices as you have cores, as that gives each core (or thread) a device to spend it’s time compressing. To do this, we add the following to the /etc/rc.local file (assuming a Debian system) :-

/sbin/modprobe zram zram_num_devices=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l)

By default the zRAM will allocate 25% of the main memory to all of the zRAM devices; personally I think that is reasonable enough. However it seems that as soon as you set the number of devices, the size defaults to zero … so we have to set the size of the device as we configure it. Once created, you will have to decide how to use the devices. In my case, I wanted to use half of the devices for swap and half for L2ARC, which I did by adding the following to /etc/rc.local :-

size=$(( ($(cat /proc/meminfo | awk '/^MemTotal/ {print $2}')*1024) / (4 * $(cat /proc/cpuinfo| grep "^processor" | wc -l)) ))
#       Complex way of determining the size of each zRAM device
for dev in /dev/zram*
do
  base=$(basename $dev)
  echo $size > /sys/block/${base}/disksize
  odd=$(( $(echo $dev | sed -e "s/^.*zram//") % 2 ))
  if [ $odd = 0 ]
  then
    /sbin/mkswap $dev
    /sbin/swapon -p 32767 $dev
  else
    zpool remove pool0 $dev > /dev/null 2>&1
    zpool add pool0 cache $dev
  fi
done

This is a rather complex way of doing it, and doesn’t contain much in the way of error checking, but it does work.

Feb 112013
 

One of the obvious things to do with a ZFS storage pool is to increase the size of the disks in it – after all disks get bigger and cheaper over time. Not that it is a very difficult thing to do, but it is always worth doing a quick search to find out what others have done before setting forth. And if nobody blogs their own experience, there’s nothing for anybody to find!

So I started off with four 2Tbyte drives configured as two vdevs each of which was a mirror. And I had two 3Tbyte disks to swap in. So I was going to be swapping one of the vdevs (consisting of two 2Tbyte drives) with the 3Tbyte drives.

In the details below, I have a storage pool called zroot and the two disks being replaced are gpt/disk3 and gpt/disk2. As you will notice, I am growing the storage pool I boot off; however the disks I am using do not contain a boot partition with the boot code.

The first job was to swap out one of the 2Tbyte drives. This was done by :-

  1. Take disk to be swapped out offline: zpool offline zroot gpt/disk3
  2. Shut down the server and take the selected drive out. Swap over the disk caddy onto a new 3Tbyte drive, and swap that back in.
  3. Power on the server.
  4. Create an EFI partition table: gpart create -s gpt ada3
  5. Optionally create a swap partition: gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 4G -l swap3 ada3
  6. Create a ZFS partion: gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l disk3 ada3
  7. Replace the device: zpool replace zroot gpt/disk3

Now is the time to wait for the resilvering process to complete. Once that has finished, the steps above can be repeated for the other drive in the vdev. Once the resilvering for that replacement has finished, you may want to check the size of the pool.

If the size has not increased, you may need to do: zpool online -e zroot gpt/disk2 gpt/disk3.