The Sun BabelFish Blog
Don't panic !
BlogEd, ZFS and OSX
I have been delaying a new release of BlogEd for quite a while now as I have been haunted by some weird and inexplicable bug. Being in Prague with the Netbeans team, many of whom have some very good experience in Swing and Java UI it was an excellent opportunity to hunt it down. So I tried to reproduce it and ... there just was no bloody bug! It had dissapeared! Gone.
Was this due to some last minute fixes in the Java 5 released to the public this week on OSX?. Or was it perhaps just simply that replacing my hard drive did the trick? Looking at that possibility there are then two further explanations: one is that somehow my java installation was corrupted by another program, the second is that the hard drive itself corrupted the data in some bizaar way. Indeed I have no idea how old the flaw that led to the drive's death has been lingering around. It took a week before it broke down completely, so perhaps the problem started months before. The file system on OSX, like most file systems in fact, assume the hard drive is functioning, and do little or no check on data quality. There is no protection of the sort offered by the new ZFS file system, Sun just released under an open source licence. ZFS apparently can immediately recognise a flawed sector on the hard drive, as it keeps a unique key for the data stored in a separate place, so that the likelyhood of both the hash and the data being corrupted in the same way simultaneously is vanishingly small. I would have immediately known about any problems with the hard drive. With mirroring it would also have been possible to avoid any data loss.
Perhaps Apple should make ZFS available on OSX. It's open source, so they can join the community too. Having been burnt once, I would feel a lot more comfortable with extra protection. And apparently this is possible without any slowdown. Not only that, but ZFS comes with a huge number of other features for data replication and backup.
Anyway, look forward to a new release of BlogEd real soon now.
Posted at 11:43PM Nov 17, 2005 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General |
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