Oooh, This is NodeBB, isn't it? I keep seeing it everywhere, but I'm a big fan of Discourse. I really should look into it. FreePBX uses Discourse (on community.freepbx.org) and I use it on some of my hobby projects, too, but this looks really nice. Anyway, I should introduce myself:

Hi! I'm xrobau, but you can call me 'That Australian Bastard that keeps breaking things'. @tm1000 pinged me because I'm the guy that's mainly responsible for SNG7 and there's a bit of confusion here, because you guys don't know the history.

So, here's some bulletpoints

1. Writing ISO to USB - We, previously, used to publish TWO images. One an ISO, for use with DVDs or VMware/HyperV/libvirt, etc, and the other an actual USB image, that HAD to be written to a USB stick, and a physical machine booted from it. There were technical reasons for that, and I hated them, so I got rid of them. One image to rule them all. You can take that image, DD it to USB, use Rufus, Stick it in an ISOstick, or actually burn it to a physical DVD if you're feeling vintage.
2. "PHP5.6 and modern PHP......" -- You misunderstood. FreePBX 14 supports PHP 7.1+, but our MINIMUM requirements are PHP 5.6. FreePBX13 has a bunch of old legacy code that precluded it from working on anything newer than PHP 5.4, so we fixed that, too. Well, actually, @tm1000 did. I just helped 8). However, our DISTRO comes with the latest in the 5.6 tree, the latest release was a couple of weeks ago, and that's what's available now.
3. Why not Fedora? Because we rely on the RHEL Kernel ABI for modules, so we don't need to recompile drivers ALL. THE. TIME. That, and it's 'good enough'. Apache 2.4, Python 2.7, plus we've added all the stuff that EPEL isn't keeping up with (Eg, NodeJS). I would LOVE to have a 4.4+ kernel, because there's a BUNCH of niggly IPv6 issues that we have to work around in the RHEL7 kernel, but, we just don't have the manpower 8-(
4. "Yes, if they want newer packages, there are repositories they can add without abandoning the core CentOS7 system" Yep. We add EPEL by default (and we provide our own mirrors, so we don't tax the 'official' ones).
5. (Edit, seconds later) I'm really annoyed that RHEL removed a bunch of perfectly good drivers (CCISS, a bunch of Network Cards) for no good reason, so I put them back, into SNG7. I didn't really make a big deal about it, because no-one really cares unless you're running hardware that's not brand new.

Ummm. I think that was it. If you've got any questions, feel free to ping me here, or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook (I'm 'xrobau' everywhere)

@scottalanmiller said in If you are new drop in say hello and introduce yourself please!:

Welcome to @xrobau who works on FreePBX!

This is true. Hi! If you need to ask me questions, I hopefully will get notifications if you tag me here, but if I don't, you can always find me on Twitter or Facebook as xrobau, and feel free to yell at me there! (I mainly use Facebook for social non-nerd stuff, and twitter for geek stuff, but occasionally they cross)

@JaredBusch if you have any problems, feel free to post in the FreePBX Forums, or ping me here!

@JaredBusch don't forget I left at the end of last year, and I'm now working with Tony at his new business Clearly IP.

One of the awesome things about GPL code is what I tweeted recently - https://twitter.com/xrobau/status/1126587963242999809 - if it's GPL, it's yours forever, basically.

I can also happily say that Clearly IP is not doing anything with FreePBX (at the moment, anyway) - I will personally still be looking after the Firewall module, on phonebo.cx, but that's about the limit of our involvement.

We have a bunch of cool ideas planned, and if you're friends with me on facebook (I'm xrobau there, too - of course) it won't take much brain sweat to figure out what that is, even though it's TECHNICALLY confidential.

There are also other people that are leaving/left - I know that David Duffet and Matt Jordan are public knowledge. I'm not sure how many of the other resignations have been made public yet, so I'm not going to say anything about them

@tm1000 said in Sangoma Linux?:

@scottalanmiller We are starting to use it to build more robust Daemons. Hey, it's better than trying to do it in PHP!!

UCP (User Control Panel) is mainly run by Node now, too, but if you look at the commits, you'll see it's 0% me, and 95% @tm1000 so he's the guy to ask

@travisdh1 I don't know what a RAID Lever is? Something to do with tuning?

@travisdh1 maybe they mean RAID LEVELS? Not levers? Which is correct. ZRAIDx means there are X ADDITIONAL copies of the data. ZRAID2 has 3 copies of each chunk, spread across physical devices. The "X" number is how many HDDs the zraid can tolerate failing.

The difference to RAID6 (for example) is that RAID6 has one copy of the data, but it's possible to figure out what the data was by looking at what remains and using the parity data to figure out what was on the missing disk(s)

OK, here's my last ditch gasp to try to get you to understand my point of view:

RAID1 doesn't use parity. RAID0 doesn't use parity. So, which RAID versions do use parity, being that this is what this entire discussion is about?

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said in Changes at Sangoma:

RAID 2 (no existing implementation)
RAID 3 (deprecated)
RAID 4 (rare)
RAID 5 (aka RAIDZ)
RAID 6 (aka RAIDZ2)
RAID 7 (aka RAIDZ3)

No. RAIDZ does not use parity. Just because people REFER to it as parity does not mean it is such. That is the 'simplification confusion'.

So yeah, sorry. There's no use continuing this discussion because you're adamant that you're correct, and you refuse to even think you could be wrong. So, being that there is no possible way for me to change you mind, there's no use me continuing, is there?

Sigh.

@scottalanmiller said in Changes at Sangoma:

You started with some mildly incorrect beliefs based on common marketing.

I'm a sysadmin. I've done courses. This is not marketing, this is training. Now, maybe I've been trained wrong, or maybe I've forgotten my training - I was actually looking through the ZoL source code to see if I was wrong (and, it looks like I may be!), but I'm just not interested any more.

You're so hung up about HOW BLOCKS ARE STORED ON THE DISK that you've ignored everything else I've said.

So. Whatever. I'm REALLY done this time.

Oh, and here's the link to the code where they ARE doing math, which is when I was about to come in and go 'Whoops, looks like I was wrong', but turns out you're just interested in being an arsehole, rather than actually engaging in discussion.

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/a8577bdb32e091645df901d8501e44ef50748389/module/zfs/vdev_raidz_math_impl.h#L525

OK, so you're obviously just trolling now. I've asked you nicely 4 times to stop spamming, and you're going out of your way to do it.

So fine, you win. I will not talk about ZFS here. You can say whatever you want, and I won't correct you. Enjoy.

@scottalanmiller Well, in this case because I'm trying to get across a REALLY COMPLEX thing, that you're having difficulty with, please respond IN ONE MESSAGE. That'll be easier to keep track of, OK? Otherwise there's no coherency.

@scottalanmiller No, because now you've just forked the conversation.

And look, you'll respond to this one, and then 15 things later you'll realise you never responded to the first thing.

@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

Actually it is for you to make it easier to read, and easier to respond,

It does the exact opposite.

@scottalanmiller Dude, dumping a huge amount of stuff in 15 different posts is TOTALLY UNCOOL and is really unfriendly. Please don't do that. I now have to quote multiple things, scroll backwards and forwards, and generally waste even more of my time.

@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

As the world moves to more reliable SSD, this has dropped off. It doesn't go away, but most corruption is believed to come from the network not the storage media, which nothing protects against (yet).

ZFS does. And, my experience is that I've had 2 SSDs silently fail and return corrupt data (of out 30 or so) and 2 spinning disks fail (out of several hundred). That's why I said it's a statistical anomaly.

@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

and probably the average person will never see it in a life time.

They will probably never NOTICE it, unless they're running btrfs or ZFS, which has inherent checksum validation.

@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

ZFS doesn't have that problem actually. You can grow a ZFS RAIDZ pool

No, you can't. In fact, the announcement of the POTENTIAL of the ability to do drew excitement from all the storage nerds. What you linked to is appending another zdev to a zpool. You can't expand a raidz.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/83wo88/any_news_on_zfs_raidz_expansion/

This is what frustrates me here - I know this stuff IN DEPTH (yes, I was wrong about parity vs copies - I dug up some of my old course notes and it said copies there - THAT was the source of my error), and you're trying to claim that you know this better than me, when you obviously don't. It's massively frustrating.

Re 'WTF are you doing with Hardware RAID, it's dead':
@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

This is not true at all. Hardware RAID remains almost totally ubiquitous in commodity hardware

Funnily enough, almost all 'hardware RAID' cards are actually software RAID with a wrapper around them. And if they're not, they're going to be slower than your CPU anyway, so, back to my original point - why ADD slowness and INCREASE failure types? Pretty much the only Hardware RAID cards these days are the PERC-esque cards. I'm not going to go into EXPLICIT details, but if your RAID card doesn't have a heatsink on it, it's almost certainly a software raid implementation.

@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

Few people promote software RAID as much as I do, but the benefits of hardware RAID are real and in no way is hardware RAID dead, dying, or useless.

Hardware RAID is slower, and more finnicky, and provides less visibility of individual platters than software RAID. For example, can a standard hardware RAID card provide access to SMART data of each drive? (No).

@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

I've done hundreds or thousands of hardware card swaps and the number of failed imports was zero.

As I said originally - the only way that is true is if you had identical cards with identical firmware versions on standby. That's perfectly fine for an EMC sized company, but it's not fine for anyone with only 200 or 300 spindles. I've had multiple P410i's refuse to import a RAID that was generated with a different version of firmware. This is not something uncommon, this is something that happens ALL THE TIME.

@scottalanmiller said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

. You picked up the challenge and decided to take the list of concerns and attempt to refute many or most of them to show why you felt ZFS (and FreeNAS) were good choices.

FreeNAS is just a wrapper for ZFS, with all the tools everyone needs built in.

ZFS is, unfortunately for those that are trying to make a living in the HARDWARE RAID space, a significant nail in their coffin. I brought up a whole bunch of things where your statements were wrong, or misleading, or in some cases totally irrelevant.

In retrospect, from your comments, it seems that that you make a living from hardware RAID, so it's somewhat unsurprising that you're trying to spread a pile of FUD on ZFS. Comments like 'people say it's magic' are just casting dispersion on it, purely to disparage it without that meaning anything.

And ZFS is so portable that I can literally pull the drives from a FreeNAS box, plug them into an Ubuntu machine, run 'zfs import' and all my data is there. Can you do that when you move your HDDs from a HP to a Dell to an IBM?

There. See how you can reply in ONE comment, rather than 30? It makes it much more constructive.

Sigh.

@scottalanmiller said in Changes at Sangoma:

You started with some mildly incorrect beliefs based on common marketing.

I'm a sysadmin. I've done courses. This is not marketing, this is training. Now, maybe I've been trained wrong, or maybe I've forgotten my training - I was actually looking through the ZoL source code to see if I was wrong (and, it looks like I may be!), but I'm just not interested any more.

You're so hung up about HOW BLOCKS ARE STORED ON THE DISK that you've ignored everything else I've said.

So. Whatever. I'm REALLY done this time.

Oh, and here's the link to the code where they ARE doing math, which is when I was about to come in and go 'Whoops, looks like I was wrong', but turns out you're just interested in being an arsehole, rather than actually engaging in discussion.

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/a8577bdb32e091645df901d8501e44ef50748389/module/zfs/vdev_raidz_math_impl.h#L525

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said in Changes at Sangoma:

RAID 2 (no existing implementation)
RAID 3 (deprecated)
RAID 4 (rare)
RAID 5 (aka RAIDZ)
RAID 6 (aka RAIDZ2)
RAID 7 (aka RAIDZ3)

No. RAIDZ does not use parity. Just because people REFER to it as parity does not mean it is such. That is the 'simplification confusion'.

So yeah, sorry. There's no use continuing this discussion because you're adamant that you're correct, and you refuse to even think you could be wrong. So, being that there is no possible way for me to change you mind, there's no use me continuing, is there?

OK, here's my last ditch gasp to try to get you to understand my point of view:

RAID1 doesn't use parity. RAID0 doesn't use parity. So, which RAID versions do use parity, being that this is what this entire discussion is about?

@scottalanmiller Sorry, dude, I'm going to give up. If you don't want to work with me here, then I'm just going to not bother.

I have no coin in this game. I'm just trying to help you out. I've been using ZFS for 15 years now, and I'm extremely confident in my knowledge. A lot of people try to simplify this and those simplifications are where you're getting confused.

Anyway, I'm out. Enjoy!

I'm not going to bother going through all the individual replies - please try to consolidate them into a single response, but almost all of them are suffering from the same misapprehension that ZFS uses parity data instead of copies. If I missed something (I skimmed through them), feel free to reply in a single post and I'll try to address any confusion.