[TriLUG] NAS box

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Magnus Hedemark wrote:

> As much as I love OpenBSD for the things that it is good at, I avoid 
> it for the things that it is not good at.  When it comes to disk 
> management, Linux wins hands-down.  Check out LVM.  To get this kind 
> of functionality anywhere else you'd have to give a lot of money to 
> Veritas.  And I'm doubtful that it's even available for OpenBSD.

Just for comparison's sake, you can get LVM's functionality on FreeBSD, 
with a package called Vinum.  Unfortunately, it is perhaps the most 
finikey piece of OSS software I have had the displeasure of playing 
with.  It is quite difficult to learn, and you're sure to crash your box 
repeatedly while learning it.  The command interpreter doesn't do hardly 
any sanity checking on the inputs you give it, and when you ask it to do 
something that's illogical, it will lock the machine, kernel and all.  I 
had trouble coming at it as someone who has used Veritas products in the 
past, and is quite familiar with LVM concepts.  It was still a bear to 
use, and still makes me sweat every time I have to reconfigure a volume.

Aaron S. Joyner