[GTALUG] Which Distro is Best for Running a ZFS-on-Linux Fileserver.

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: David Mason via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I am interested in this question too.  I currently am running on Debian 
| 7.7 but I’m not sure I can upgrade to a more current version, which is 
| frustrating because I want to install Java (to run a Minecraft server) 
| and (when I tried, so while back) I couldn’t get it to install because I 
| had such an old version of Debian.

Back in 2017 March 12 you mentioned a problem "Updating Wheezy to Jessie".  
Did you try Stewart's and Lennart's suggestions?

This is exactly the kind of problem that a debian local users group might 
address.  Recently I suggested that GTALUG could function as a debian LUG.  
I guess that here we have a test of this idea.

| So I was thinking of FreeBSD, but OmniOS looks pretty interesting. I 
| won’t be doing any upgrade for several months (because as far as I can 
| see, I need to install a new ZFS system and copy it over. I can’t risk 
| loosing this system). It would be good to have a backup, anyway. I could 
| try this on a virtual system, but I don’t know long it would take to 
| back-up over the network.

Even for the debian upgrade attempt it might be good to have a backup.

If one falls behind on updates, there is a greater incentive to stand 
still and fall further behind.  A vicious circle.  I've had that happen.

After enough time, the old hardware becomes obsolete too and it makes
total system rebuild more sensible than update.  In my most recent
example, I jumped about 15 years ahead in hardware.