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My Bitcoin Core system maxed out it's disk which was almost completely Bitcoin blocks. So I broke down and bought a NAS. It uses BTRFS (better file system :-) .
This thing is like a super server compared to the mini computers back in the 90's. Root access, easy, easy. Postgres already installed with Perl and Python. Root can do a lot of stuff on-line with btrfs.
  • Synology DS223j
  • Western Digital Blue 6TB (2). ** Configured raid 1 (mirrored).

Design

Ohad Rodeh's original proposal at USENIX 2007 noted that B+ trees, which are widely used as on-disk data structures for databases, could not efficiently allow copy-on-write-based snapshots because its leaf nodes were linked together: if a leaf was copied on write, its siblings and parents would have to be as well, as would their siblings and parents and so on until the entire tree was copied. He suggested instead a modified B-tree (which has no leaf linkage), with a refcount associated to each tree node but stored in an ad hoc free map structure and certain relaxations to the tree's balancing algorithms to make them copy-on-write friendly. The result would be a data structure suitable for a high-performance object store that could perform copy-on-write snapshots, while maintaining good concurrency.[18]
208 sats \ 9 replies \ @ama 4 Dec
I've been using btrfs on most of my servers, workstations, and laptops, both at work and at home for many years now. It's the dream of any systems administrator with it's great capabilities to manage hard drives and perform software RAID at file level (instead of the traditional block level that hardware RAID does), and the copy on write (CoW) and its self healing properties...
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It all sounds fine to me.
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30 sats \ 7 replies \ @ama 5 Dec
Oh, believe me, it's much more than just fine. :-)
I like BSD systems (mainly OpenBSD for it's extreme privacy and security focus, but also NetBSD and FreeBSD) much more than I like Linux for a long time now, and I use them in some boxes. But I mostly use Devuan because I like and depend on btrfs so much...
FreeBSD has ZFS, and NetBSD and other BSD flavors have similar file systems, like hammer, but none of them I like as much as I like btrfs.
Maybe if OpenBSD implemented any of those new generation file systems with CoW, self healing, software RAID capabilities I could make the jump... One can only hope... :-)
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I was raised on Unix and like the Berkley flavor. Most of my time was using Data General, HP, Sun and IBM Unixi.
I think this Synology Linux is based on Debian, which is my favorite Linux.
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30 sats \ 5 replies \ @ama 5 Dec
I believe it is, yes.
I used Debian for 26 years as my main driver, until they decided to use systemd and kill the freedom of choice for the init system.
I then upgraded all my boxes from Debian ascii to Devuan ascii to keep my freedom of choice and remain free of the systemd catastrophe.
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Is systemd really that bad?
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20 sats \ 3 replies \ @ama 5 Dec
It is, in my opinion. It attempts against the UNIX philosophy of dedicated programs which do one thing well, and it infest all UNIX layers from init to the graphical interface (X) to desktop environments to even some specific software. I truly think it's awful.
But even worse is removing the freedom to chose which init system you want to use. I love that Devuan (the Debian fork which keeps the freedom spirit of the original Debian developers) let me chose between several init systems:
It was sad jumping from Debian after 26 years of unconditional love. But I'm so happy that I finally did it. :-)
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OK I'm installing Devuan on that Bitcoin Core system and reloading the blockchain on the NAS.