Quickstart Guide needs help

Moderators: jhartley, MSR734, nola

Quickstart Guide needs help

Post by TomUnderhill » Sun Nov 04, 2012 3:37 am

I honestly applaud the Zevo team (however many or few you may be) for continuing development of a much-needed solution that keeps my bits from rotting. Unfortunately, the Quickstart Guide appears to be a hastily-produced afterthought. The Zevo website pulls no punches that this is a CLI-driven release of the filesystem, and I'm fine with that! From a reading of these discussions, it appears I'm not the only one who was left scratching their head (or other body parts) after reading the Guide. I also get the feeling that many of us hoped for more real guidance than the scant 13 pages gave us.

As currently compiled, the Quickstart Guide could be the greatest roadblock to continuing acceptance in the Mac community and perception of Zevo as a real product. It would be an interesting analysis of the number of downloads (by "IP address" if possible) versus the number of unique "IP addresses" that check for updates versus the longevity of these "IP addresses" in their checking for updates. I loosely use "IP address" to mean some sort of unique identifier, not necessarily a meaningless NAT-neutered 192.168.1.13 or 10.0.0.5.

I understand that Zevo is currently a free community release of a commercial product and is not open source. I also understand this is a users' discussion board. I own a short-run publishing company specializing in high-quality, limited edition books and am also the author of thirteen books. Most of these have been how-to books on various topics including photography, photo retouching and computer safety. It's in this capacity that I'm currently posting.

In an attempt to improve a product I'm invested in (heck, you're holding my data which is more precious than my balls!), I'm willing to offer my technical writing, book design and publishing experience to the documentation end of the project. I'm a technical Mac user with far too many years experience with various Windows iterations, yet still new to ZFS and Zevo. I'm stumbling along with Zevo, and a strong Quickstart Guide might just make this journey a bit more enjoyable.

The Zevo Community Edition package may not be "suitable" for my mom or many of my septuagenarian clients, but I'd hate to see the current documentation stand in the way of this product becoming what is can and should be.
TomUnderhill Offline


 
Posts: 36
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 8:06 am
Location: Southern California

Re: Quickstart Guide needs help

Post by grahamperrin » Sun Nov 04, 2012 8:27 am

+1
and big thanks, I hope that your kind offer is accepted.

(Tom, were you in the private beta? And/or a user of Silver Edition? (I remember few names – sorry.))

Historically: Silver Edition included a ZEVO Setup Assistant (utility app) that partly negated the need for a written guide.

There's a mass of ZFS-related information spread across the 'net but very little that I'd describe as quick start for any platform.

I'd welcome a guide for ZEVO on OS X.

Even better, more broadly ZFS on OS X. Sections such as:

  1. one-page intro to ZEVO (what it is, what it isn't)
  2. a few pages of generic stuff that might apply to any implementation of ZFS for OS X
  3. a page of things that are specific to ZEVO, this could include the zstat command
  4. interactions with other implementations of ZFS, this could include a paragraph on FreeBSD or OpenIndiana in a virtual machine; maybe three or four paragraphs on MacZFS; a clear but non-alarmist expression of what is and is not officially supported
  5. closing pages (one or two?) with further reading and links

– or is that potentially too broad to be quick start?

Side note: months ago someone queried the spaces between the four uppercase letters (Z E V O, stylised in System Preferences). I don't know the official answer, but the other day I saw it sideways for the first time. Whatever the meaning, I like the look:

ZEVO, rotated.png
ZEVO, rotated.png (9.01 KiB) Viewed 553 times


It's > more than something. What that thing is, I haven't decided :)
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Quickstart Guide: publication

Post by grahamperrin » Sun Nov 04, 2012 8:28 am

An additional suggestion: the guide should be published (not limited to registered downloaders of the installer).
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Re: Quickstart Guide needs help

Post by TomUnderhill » Mon Nov 05, 2012 12:48 am

grahamperrin wrote:+1
and big thanks, I hope that your kind offer is accepted.


Thanks, Graham. I'm often the wild and wacky one at many of the parties I go to (being married with five kids I don't get out to many parties any more), and I had a half-hour religious discussion at church with a young man who has a Hackintosh with lots of drive bays, does video editing and contemplating switching to Windows because his 9800GTX is unsupported by Adobe for Premiere, but allows CUDA and the Mercury playback engine under Windows but not OS X. Needless to say, I'm checking for a proper card firmware that might allow CUDA on OS X. Our discussion focused a lot on Zevo/ZFS and he had trouble grasping some of the neat stuff in the file system. He's currently in med school and speed is not his greatest need--data integrity is. (Known him for more than a decade and glad to see he's growing up and thinking beyond speed) I had assumed that there was a way to shoehorn ZFS into Windows (heck, if you can put a keylogger into Windows you gotta be able to get ZFS in, eh?), well, not the first of many of my errors.

I was in neither the private beta nor the Silver Edition.

I like your general concepts for the book, especially the idea of ZFS on OS X more than ZEVO on OS X. I can see how a GUI could partly negate the guide, but just remember how vastly different ZFS is from almost anything else. If nothing else, I see the guide somewhat paying homage to The Guide (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to be exact) in that ZFS is a really, really, really big place (42 fits into it somewhere I'm sure).

But on a more important and serious note, ZFS requires more than just a flashy brochure. ZFS really needs a professional document that calls out the differences between NTFS, XFAT, HFS+ and RAID. Something to express the satisfying beauty of data integrity and its superiority to predictive drive failure.

The guide needs a section on strategy. Why would someone want a three-drive mirror instead of a four-drive RAID5? Why would a home user want ZFS? What's generally better for performance, a stripe of four mirrored pairs or eight drives in a RAIDZ2? The chap I spoke with today almost couldn't believe that just setting the individual drives as individual drives in BIOS and configuring ZEVO could work more magic than his motherboard hardware RAID could do.

Heck... one of the three ZEVO installations I've done is for a friend of mine who is your grandmother's age. I helped her buy a new Retina MacBook Pro 13 system to replace an old Windows desktop and a newer Windows laptop. She's starting out in ZFS with a single drive pool on FireWire 800 to hold all her historical data from the Windows machines (I'm not willing to bet against finding bit rot from that data!). In a couple of months we'll add a second drive to create her mirror. I can't tell you how excited she was when I described a file system with data integrity!

This document needs to be a tour guide, sales tool, how-to book and technical manual... I'm still figuring out what it might or might not have in it, but a lot of decision making can only happen after an invitation. Until then, I'm playing with my new toy, entrusting it with my future and my past and enjoying a freedom that seems to be another computer promise made by some big monolithic operating system company, and now coming true somewhere else.

Enough dreaming. I've got to get to sleep soon!
TomUnderhill Offline


 
Posts: 36
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 8:06 am
Location: Southern California

Re: Quickstart Guide needs help

Post by grahamperrin » Mon Nov 05, 2012 2:00 am

+1
to all things except one:

  • section on strategy

– that certainly belongs in a guide, but maybe not with quick start.

One key thing I learnt from my first question in Server Fault – more precisely the movement of that question from Super User, and discussion of that movement in Stack Exchange chat rooms – is that for some aspects of ZFS, generalisation may be difficult or inappropriate. Still, I got what I think is a single perfect answer to my very general question!

So. What might help individuals, newcomers to ZEVO/ZFS, to form their own strategy?

Visuals. (Recall how widely the public appreciated the comic strip approach to the introduction of Google Chrome.)

For the source of ZFS, here's something neat (not for a quick start guide for end users, but exemplary of a good diagram):

Image

– from Source Tour (Community Group zfs.source) - XWiki (2009-10-26)

For end use of ZFS, is there anything as neat?

Readers: if you have any links, please throw them at me now – thanks!

Somewhere between the complexity of an existing diagram for ZFS – and the sparse simplicity of an Apple home page when a major new product or service is introduced – there'll be a diagram for a quick start guide that may help the viewer to grasp key concepts.
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Re: Quickstart Guide needs help

Post by TomUnderhill » Mon Nov 05, 2012 2:16 pm

grahamperrin wrote:+1
to all things except one:

  • section on strategy

– that certainly belongs in a guide, but maybe not with quick start.


Perhaps our definitions of strategy differ. I am suggesting a Quick Start strategy, aimed at folks with smaller datasets. Your visuals are a good start

Some imagery and descriptions taken from the formal doctrine that spells out the difference between RAID0 and mirror, RAID5 and RAIDZ, etc.

A better word might have been
    Visual Introduction to ZFS Drive Organization

In regard to
grahamperrin wrote:For end use of ZFS, is there anything as neat?

Readers: if you have any links, please throw them at me now – thanks!

Somewhere between the complexity of an existing diagram for ZFS – and the sparse simplicity of an Apple home page when a major new product or service is introduced – there'll be a diagram for a quick start guide that may help the viewer to grasp key concepts.

we will be the ones to create them from the technical descriptions. This is what I do with my day job.

I am not a member of the ZEVO design/programming/marketing team. I have no influence on who they target their product to. I just know that I've had two of my authors (one writes ebooks for a different publisher and the other is a really nice grandmother) absolutely jump at the chance of having a file system that will eliminate bit rot! If our Quick Start guide (or a future iteration of it) does not reach down to the SOHO folks, we'll be losing a lot of perspective company with happy data.

Together, we can describe ZEVO in a way that anyone will understand it, see its uses and be able to install it.

And I've got my mom and a trained monkey to test it against.
TomUnderhill Offline


 
Posts: 36
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 8:06 am
Location: Southern California

table of versions

Post by grahamperrin » Wed Nov 07, 2012 2:03 am

http://content.wuala.com/contents/zfs-r ... sions.html for a table of versions.

Not the best HTML, but it's more orderly than the list in the OpenSolaris area.

Hint: if you bookmark the table, bookmark the URL above (not the URL to which Wuala redirects).
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

the bigger pictures

Post by grahamperrin » Fri Nov 09, 2012 2:06 am

Suggestions concerning this forum include topics that might be pinned.

From some (not all) pins, the essence might be added to a quick start guide; and immediately after an edition of the guide is published, there should be both:

  1. promotion of the guide; and
  2. removal of those pins.

Keywords: coordination, relevance, current.

The bigger pictures

Complementary to each other:

  • integral help (imagine, at least, a question mark icon ? in the ZEVO pane of System Preferences)
  • quick start guide to ZEVO
  • forum for ZEVO
  • wiki for ZEVO
  • mailing list by GreenBytes, Inc.
  • blog by GreenBytes, Inc.
  • microblogs by GreenBytes, Inc. and by individuals
  • masses of other information beyond the GreenBytes domain.

Side note: #ZEVO and #ZFS tags (Twitter search failures)

I have an idea that what's currently in the wiki could be better placed elsewhere – reducing the number of places to seek information.

(No disrespect to contributors to that wiki; I'm simply reflecting on personal experience where I was asked to administer a wiki for a too-small group of contributors. For a wiki to shine as a wiki it needs champions, widespread collaboration and more. For ZEVO: time spent on championing of a wiki could be better spent on development of software and other resources.)
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Re: Quickstart Guide needs help

Post by grahamperrin » Sat Nov 10, 2012 4:04 am

TomUnderhill wrote:… we will be the ones to create them from the technical descriptions. This is what I do with my day job. …


I shouldn't post repeatedly to this topic, so here for reference are my ZFS-related bookmarks:

http://www.diigo.com/user/grahamperrin/ZFS

That's public (as is most of my stuff in Diigo), but not necessarily designed for public consumption. (For something more stylish and ordered, I'd use a Diigo list.) In other words, it's not a guide. But some of what's bookmarked might help us to think about a guide.
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

cross reference

Post by grahamperrin » Sat Nov 24, 2012 1:47 am

Under troubleshooting flowchart:

Some of this topic, or its chart, might overlap with Quickstart Guide needs help.
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: ilovezfs and 0 guests

cron