Haha... yeah, I didn't intend that as a brag or badge of honor or anything—more like a badge of idiocy—but you don't play Human Install Script and a-package-upgrade-broke-my-whole-system troubleshooter for several years without learning how things fit together and getting pretty comfortable with system config a level or two below what a lot of Linux users ever dig into. Just meant I'm a little past "complete newbie" so that's not the trouble. :-)
> In the future, you may want to try creating a sandbox for yourself to try things? I did all my testing of my app re: btrfs with zvols similarly:
Really good advice, thanks. I was aware it had substantial capabilities to work in this manner, but using it this way hadn't occurred to me. Gotta get over being stuck in "filesystems operate on disks or partitions on disks that are recorded in such a way that any tools and filesystem, not just a particular one, can understand and work with" mode. I mean I'm comfortable enough with files as virtual disks, but having a specific FS tools, rather than a set of general tools, transparently manage those for me, too, seems... spooky and data-lossy. Which I know it isn't, but it makes the hair on my neck stand up anyway. Maybe my "lock-in" warning sensors are tuned too sensitive.
Now to figure out how to run those commands as a user that doesn't have the ability to destroy any of the real pools... ideally without having to make a whole VM for it, or set up ZFS on a second machine, and—initial search results suggest this may be a problem, for the specific case of want unprivileged users to run zfs-create without granting them too much access—on Linux, not FreeBSD :-/
> Here for this. Already delighted and amused. ;)
Haha... yeah, I didn't intend that as a brag or badge of honor or anything—more like a badge of idiocy—but you don't play Human Install Script and a-package-upgrade-broke-my-whole-system troubleshooter for several years without learning how things fit together and getting pretty comfortable with system config a level or two below what a lot of Linux users ever dig into. Just meant I'm a little past "complete newbie" so that's not the trouble. :-)
> In the future, you may want to try creating a sandbox for yourself to try things? I did all my testing of my app re: btrfs with zvols similarly:
Really good advice, thanks. I was aware it had substantial capabilities to work in this manner, but using it this way hadn't occurred to me. Gotta get over being stuck in "filesystems operate on disks or partitions on disks that are recorded in such a way that any tools and filesystem, not just a particular one, can understand and work with" mode. I mean I'm comfortable enough with files as virtual disks, but having a specific FS tools, rather than a set of general tools, transparently manage those for me, too, seems... spooky and data-lossy. Which I know it isn't, but it makes the hair on my neck stand up anyway. Maybe my "lock-in" warning sensors are tuned too sensitive.
Now to figure out how to run those commands as a user that doesn't have the ability to destroy any of the real pools... ideally without having to make a whole VM for it, or set up ZFS on a second machine, and—initial search results suggest this may be a problem, for the specific case of want unprivileged users to run zfs-create without granting them too much access—on Linux, not FreeBSD :-/