chukker

Eh, it's not really hardcore. It just means that if I lose a hard drive I can replace it and not have to restore from backups. Some people might think it's better, but that's arguable (anyone up for a vi vs. emacs war? :-)). Besides, it only really has good support on FreeBSD and Solaris/Solaris-derivatives, so if you want RAID on linux you need to use something else.

I almost didn't mention that, because who doesn't like ScootaDash?

ZFS is kind of like raid, lvm, and a filesystem all in one. Instead of using a raid card to combine drives, creating a physical volume/volume group, and the creating filesystems on top of that, everything is controlled by ZFS. It breaks all the abstraction layers, but that turns out not to be a horrible thing when dealing with filesystems. You can combine 6 disks, for example, in a configuration that can withstand 2 drive failures (similar to raid6, but it's called raidz2). All data is checksummed and auto-healing, so there's no fsck command, although there is a background scrub you should run occasionally. And it uses copy-on-write, so you can snapshot/clone a huge filesystem instantly, and it won't use any additional space until you make changes to one of them (and then, only enough space to store block-level differences). I use this for snapshots - I have snaphots of my home directory every four hours going back two weeks. And new filesystems can be created/expanded/reduced in size almost instantly. This also makes consistent backups really easy. The only downside is memory consumption. But in a dedicated file server that's not too big a problem. I'd like to use OpenBSD almost exclusively, but the lack of good virtualization support (no, sparc ldom does *not* count) and lack of a fuse-like filesystem make it a pain. FreeBSD works, and I like ports, but I don't like having to compile everything from scratch all the time, and don't really want to bother setting up my own build server. NetBSD could work, but I never quite got along with pkgsrc for some reason (which is my fault, not pkgsrc's). DragonflyBSD also uses pkgsrc. Debian generally just works,

I have a soft spot for OpenBSD. The documentation for the BSDs is so much better than linux, I think - the man pages actually contain useful information, and aren't just references to info pages (which contain exactly the same information as the man page - no, not bitter at all). And I prefer BSD-style rc startup. It's hard to beat the convenience of apt-get, however, so mostly I stick with Debian (and Centos at work - not my choice, but it's functional, and I won't argue with that). edit: Oh, and FreeNAS for my file server. I <3 ZFS.

Lenovo ThinkPad. I have a used X61 I got on ebay for under $200 - probably closer to $100 now. Install an SSD, upgrade the memory, and maybe get a new battery and you'll have a perfectly useable laptop. Newer models are also likely to be good.

Hi everyone (oops - s/everyone/everypony/g), I'm a programmer, and a recently-converted brony. I like fan fiction, and read "Friendship is Optimal" before watching any of the show. It's good. I don't like sad fanfic, however. Light shipping is ok, and I have a huge soft spot for Dash/Scootaloo stories. I've spent a decent amount of time around horses in real life, hence my username.