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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • It sounds like nobody actually understood what you want.

    You have a non-ZFS boot drive, and a big ZFS pool, and you want to save an image of the boot drive to the pool, as a backup for the boot drive.

    I guess you don’t want to image the drive while booted off it, because that could produce an image that isn’t fully self-consistent. So then the problem is getting at the pool from something other than the system you have.

    I think what you need to do is find something else you can boot that supports ZFS. I think the Ubuntu live images will do it. If not, you can try something like re-installing the setup you have, but onto a USB drive.

    Then you have to boot to that and zfs import your pool. ZFS is pretty smart so it should just auto-detect the pool structure and where it wants to be mounted, and you can mount it. Don’t do a ZFS feature upgrade on the pool though, or the other system might not understand it. It’s also possible your live kernel might not have a new enough ZFS to understand the features your pool uses, and you might need to find a newer one.

    Then once the pool is mounted you should be able to dd your boot drive block device to a file on the pool.

    If you can’t get this to work, you can try using a non-ZFS-speaking live Linux and dding your image to somewhere on the network big enough to hold it, which you may or may not have, and then booting the system and copying back from there to the pool.







  • Zuckerberg Did Nothing Wrong

    I’m concerned that the narrative that what Facebook was trying to achieve here was wrong or bad is itself user-hostile, and pushes in favor of the non-fiduciary model of software.

    Facebook paid people to let them have access to those people’s communications with Snap, Inc., via Snapchat’s app. This is so that Facebook could do their analytics magic and try and work out how often Snapchat users tend to do X, Y, or Z. Did they pay enough? Who knows. Would you take the deal? Maybe not. Was this a totally free choice without any influence from the creeping specter of capitalist immiseration? Of course not. But it’s not some unusually nefarious plot when a person decides to let a company watch them do stuff! Privacy isn’t about never being allowed to reveal what you are up to. Some people like to fill out those little surveys they get in the mail.

    Now, framing this as Facebook snooping on Snapchat’s data concedes that a person’s communications from their Snapchat app to Snapchat HQ are Snapchat’s data. Not that person’s data, to do with as they please. If the user interferes with the normal operation of one app at the suggestion of someone who runs a different app, this framing would see that as two apps having a fight, with user agency nowhere to be found. I think it is important to see this as a user making a choice about what their system is going to do. Snapchat on your phone is entirely your domain; none of it belongs to Snap, Inc. If you want to convince it to send all your Snapchat messages to the TV in Zuckerberg’s seventh bathroom in exchange for his toenail clippings, that’s your $DEITY-given right.

    User agency is under threat already, and we should not write it away just to try and make Facebook look bad.










  • I think you can keep doing the SMB shares and use an overlay filesystem on top of those to basically stack them on top of each other, so that server1/dir1/file1.txt and server2/dir1/file2.txt and server3/dir1/file3.txt all show up in the same folder. I’m not sure how happy that is when one of the servers just isn’t there though.

    Other than that you probably need some kind of fancy FUSE application to fake a filesystem that works the way you want. Maybe some kind of FUES-over-Git-Annex system exists that could do it already?

    I wouldn’t really recommend IPFS for this. It’s tough to get it to actually fetch the blocks promptly for files unless you manually convince it to connect to the machine that has them. It doesn’t really solve the shared-drive problem as far as I know (you’d have like several IPNS paths to juggle for the different libraries, and you’d have to have a way to update them when new files were added). Also it won’t do any encryption or privacy: anyone who has seen the same file that you have, and has the IPFS hash of it, will be able to convince you to distribute the file to them (whether you have a license to do so or not).