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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Honestly, if you’re doing regular backups and your ZFS system isn’t being used for business you’re probably fine. Yes, you are at increased risk of a second disk failure during resilver but even if that happens you’re just forced to use your backups, not complete destruction of the data.

    You can also mitigate the risk of disk failure during resilver somewhat by ensuring that your disks are of different ages. The increased risk comes somewhat from the fact that if you have all the same brand of disks that are all the same age and/or from the same batch/factory they’re likely to die from age around the same time, so when one disk fails others might be soon to follow, especially during the relatively intense process of resilvering.

    Otherwise, with the number of disks you have you’re likely better off just going with mirrors rather than RAIDZ at all. You’ll see increased performance, especially on write, and you’re not losing any space with a 3-way mirror versus a 3-disk RAIDZ2 array anyway.

    The ZFS pool design guidelines are very conservative, which is a good thing because data loss can be catastrophic, but those guidelines were developed with pools that are much larger than yours and for data in mind that is fundamentally irreplaceable, such as user generated data for a business versus a personal media server.

    Also, in general backups are more important than redundancy, so it’s good you’re doing that already. RAID is about maintaining uptime, data security is all about backups. Personally, I’d focus first on a solid 3-2-1 backup plan rather than worrying too much about trying to mitigate your current array suffering catastrophic failure.


  • Another option is to avoid the installer entirely and install from a live environment using chroot and whatever your distro’s installation bootstrap tool is. I started using this method to install Debian on ZFS root using this method for a while and it’s become my go-to method for installing most distros as it gives you the most control over the resulting OS. It will also often take some distro-specific knowledge but is also a valuable learning opportunity.







  • Yeah basically all a “distribution” is is a selection of software and configurations, and they distribute (hence the name) that software and configurations as a bundle. It definitely can be daunting to learn all of this at once as a newcomer, but on the other side of that coin I’ve seen many people begin their Linux journey on a “beginner friendly” distribution who come to see that distro’s configs as default and need to unlearn/relearn many habits as they progress through their journey. I think, too, that often people who are immersed in the Linux world don’t have a great perspective on what is/isn’t confusing for a new user and often end up obfuscating things with other things that are just as complicated, if not more.



  • spencer@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat do you think about this?
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    8 months ago

    While I find that I agree with his takes like, 55% of the time, I do agree that Debian and Arch are basically the S-tier distros. So many of the other ones are basically just opinionated Debian or Arch, and while those can be useful when you’re getting started, I’ve found that for the long haul you’re better off just figuring out how to configure the base distribution with the elements of the opinionated ones that you like rather than use those distros themselves. Also, RIP CentOS. I would have put that in a high tier before the RHELmageddon (not top tier mind you, but it had a well defined use case and was great for that purpose).


  • Something I’ve found very helpful is time tracking. I have an app on my phone that is always running a timer where I input a task and a project (basically a category for the task). What this has forced me to do is to consciously decide when I’m doing a thing, and it acts as a kind of lightning rod for my attention. When I start a new task, I need to decide that is what I’m going to do and put it into the app, and if I find myself drifting from the task I must either stay focussed or decide that I’m not able to focus on the current task and instead focus on what is distracting me. It helps me remind myself that “now is the time for X, not for Y.”



  • spencer@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlDuality of c/memes
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    9 months ago

    The thing with cats is that they just kinda know themselves and offer you the deal of “yeah these are the three nice things I like to do and the three annoying things I like to do and if that jives with you, we’ll work. Otherwise, I guess just let me back outside and I’ll go back to eating birds and shit.” So every cat owner is like “yeah sure he vomits in my shoes every 2-3 days so I just turn them upside down when I take them off but he likes to sleep on the couch beside me when I watch TV and that’s our special time, you don’t really need to get it.”