I ran into a troublesome ZFS bug several months ago where a pool with a log device became “stuck”. The ‘zpool remove’ command would complete but would not remove the device. This was a bad place to be in, because the device was no longer usable, could not be removed, and would most likely prevent the pool from ever being exported and reimported again. Someone else had posted on the zfs-discuss mailing list about the same problem and put me in contact with George Wilson, who in turn put me on the right track to a successful workaround.

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NexentaOS has come a long way over the last year, and has recently released Nexenta Core Platform 1.0 which is considered stable. In doing so, the developers are providing a minimal core set of well tested packages somewhat akin to Debian’s netinst that can be used for building up servers or entire distributions. In fact, they’re encouraging this by providing a distribution builder. This opens up many possibilities for extending what you can do with the OS, and I hope to start experimenting with it soon to produce an updated XFCE4 desktop.

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