Archive for the ‘Storage’ Category.

Trying to cancel your fusionxhost account!

For a few months now I have been backing up my server using rsync to some space at fxhbackup which is part of fusionxhost.com. The backups worked well and I never really had any problems. There was an issue with the control panel showing my disk usage incorrectly but I opened a ticket and they didn’t seem too bothered – and I wasn’t either as long as my backups carried on working.

The only issue I really had with the service was trying to cancel it recently. I couldn’t find a link in my control panel, or on their website, to cancel the service so I opened a ticket asking them how to cancel my service. For 2 days nothing happened and then, with no communication, my access stopped working.

I have since e-mailed them asking if the would confirm that, in fact, my service has been terminated but no reply.

So, I can do nothing but cancel my PayPal subscription and assume that that’s the end of it.

A real shame of a way to end what was a reasonably pleasant experience.

I don’t think I’d go back to them. The service worked pretty well but I can do without the hassle of trying to chase them up over account queries.

So, fusionxhost, if you’re listening out there please let me know if my account has been canceled!  :-)

Update: fusionxhost did contact me about a week later to apologize and confirm that my account had indeed been canceled. Who knows, maybe this post even helped  :-)

So, would I recommend them? Maybe. The service was pretty good, I never had any problems with it.

ZFS: The future of filesystems?

ZFS is the (relatively) new filesystem from Sun with some fascinating properties. Here are some headline facts just to get your attention – the maximum size of a single file on a zfs filesystem is 16 ExiBytes (that’s 1000 million gigabytes), it’s possible to take a complete filesystem backup (snapshot) in a few seconds and you’ll never have to fsck your filesystem again to make sure it’s not corrupt.

So, sounds pretty impressive, heh? So what makes all this possible?

There are 3 main components to zfs that enable a lot of the cool functionality. If you’ve used a NetApp OnTap based filer before then these will sound familiar (hence, Netapp and Sun’s lawyers getting in a bit of overtime).

The first component is the Copy On Write transactional model (COW). This means that when a block of data on the filesystem changes it is not overwritten, a new block is created and the metadata for the file that has changed is updated.

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