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I think Oracle's decision to not keep Solaris open source, at least the ZFS portions, is enormously shortsighted. The fact that there is a ZFS implementation (

I think Oracle's decision to not keep Solaris open source, at least the ZFS portions, is enormously shortsighted. The fact that there is a ZFS implementation (with so many of the original ZFS engineers behind it) still being developed in the open and used by multiple operating systems, but especially the Linux juggernaut, shows that Oracle really doesn't have any benefit to keeping it closed any longer. It has forked. We now have the Oracle ZFS with features and functionality that is not in the open source variant, and the open source ZFS that is apparently adding features and commands that are not in the closed source ZFS. A huge selling point for the open source implementation is the fact that if you decide to change vendors or OSes, you can easily do so without having a huge data migration (zpool export on the old, zpool import on the new). Except, for Solaris 11+. You can't go back and forth between them, so once you're on Solaris 11, you're stuck. Yes, this is most definitely FUD, but I can easily see this being used in the not-so-distant future once Linux vendors start supporting/advertising it for themselves. I think that if Oracle were to open (and keep open) the newer releases (even if a few releases behind, like they were originally claiming they would), it would eliminate that argument completely. Personally, I'd be absolutely thrilled with a cross-platform on-disk ZFS (I triple-boot Linux/OSX/Solaris on my notebook). Professionally, I'd love to see a cross-platform on-disk ZFS simply to be able to throw the appropriate OS behind the data.

drewcrawford 14y ago
The big thing missing from the OSS implementations that Oracle 11 has got is FDE. It's possible with dmcrypt and LUKS, but you void most of the reasons for using ZFS. encryptFS is also a possibility, but it's both much less secure (an attacker can run ls) and also drops a few ZFS features like dedup. Meanwhile, Solaris 11 has FDE that actually works, and there seems to be no serious FOSS effort either to reverse engineer their work, or to design something better. In 2013, no software developer should be storing things without FDE unless they have unusual physical security measures. That makes FOSS ZFS a non-starter for most of the people who would use it.
- glabifrons 14y ago
  Filesystem encryption is very handy for a notebook computer (I use it, myself), but in a datacenter it's value is a bit more questionable. Where do you store your encryption keys? If they're on a removable USB device (for example), you'd have to contact the datacenter personnel to plug them in in the event you had to reboot (which happens from time to time if you perform OS SRU uprades). If the USB device is left in the server and someone gains privileged access to the machine, they've got the key as well as the data. If the USB device is not in the server and someone gains privileged access to the machine, they still have access to the data. The only time disk encryption is valuable is when the machine is off or the disks are being transported.
  - drewcrawford 14y ago
    > The only time disk encryption is valuable is when the machine is off or the disks are being transported. I'm thinking about the case where you have a computer in the home or office environment, e.g. the burglary attack vector. It's not just notebooks that get stolen. I'm also considering the corporate or government espionage vector, where you have a reasonably skilled on-site attacker trying to read or modify the disk contents. In this case you are typing the keys in on boot, and you either ignore the RAM extraction attacks (which are difficult to execute in practice for non-academic attackers) or you can mitigate them by storing in L1 cache and so on. Datacenters have unusually high physical security, and in addition I don't generally store highly sensitive data there (my work doesn't involve PCI compliance etc.) Whereas I do have PCI-level data about myself on my own computers.
    - glabifrons 14y ago
      "It's not just notebooks that get stolen." Very good point. I guess I've been working in environments with datacenters too long. :) "I'm also considering the corporate or government espionage vector, where you have a reasonably skilled on-site attacker trying to read or modify the disk contents." Again though, that only protects you if the disks are out or the machine is down. If you have someone with that level of skill within your organization, they'll likely gain access to the running computer where the data has already been made accessible in decrypted form.

drewcrawford 14y ago

The big thing missing from the OSS implementations that Oracle 11 has got is FDE. It's possible with dmcrypt and LUKS, but you void most of the reasons for using ZFS. encryptFS is also a possibility, but it's both much less secure (an attacker can run ls) and also drops a few ZFS features like dedup. Meanwhile, Solaris 11 has FDE that actually works, and there seems to be no serious FOSS effort either to reverse engineer their work, or to design something better. In 2013, no software developer should be storing things without FDE unless they have unusual physical security measures. That makes FOSS ZFS a non-starter for most of the people who would use it.

glabifrons 14y ago
Filesystem encryption is very handy for a notebook computer (I use it, myself), but in a datacenter it's value is a bit more questionable. Where do you store your encryption keys? If they're on a removable USB device (for example), you'd have to contact the datacenter personnel to plug them in in the event you had to reboot (which happens from time to time if you perform OS SRU uprades). If the USB device is left in the server and someone gains privileged access to the machine, they've got the key as well as the data. If the USB device is not in the server and someone gains privileged access to the machine, they still have access to the data. The only time disk encryption is valuable is when the machine is off or the disks are being transported.
- drewcrawford 14y ago
  > The only time disk encryption is valuable is when the machine is off or the disks are being transported. I'm thinking about the case where you have a computer in the home or office environment, e.g. the burglary attack vector. It's not just notebooks that get stolen. I'm also considering the corporate or government espionage vector, where you have a reasonably skilled on-site attacker trying to read or modify the disk contents. In this case you are typing the keys in on boot, and you either ignore the RAM extraction attacks (which are difficult to execute in practice for non-academic attackers) or you can mitigate them by storing in L1 cache and so on. Datacenters have unusually high physical security, and in addition I don't generally store highly sensitive data there (my work doesn't involve PCI compliance etc.) Whereas I do have PCI-level data about myself on my own computers.
  - glabifrons 14y ago
    "It's not just notebooks that get stolen." Very good point. I guess I've been working in environments with datacenters too long. :) "I'm also considering the corporate or government espionage vector, where you have a reasonably skilled on-site attacker trying to read or modify the disk contents." Again though, that only protects you if the disks are out or the machine is down. If you have someone with that level of skill within your organization, they'll likely gain access to the running computer where the data has already been made accessible in decrypted form.