Also agreed. The mind of a bigot only shrinks if you shine more light on it.

There is nothing great about it. I have both an iPhone and a BB, and the BB email client is clunky, slow, and unintuitive by comparison. I can't even file an email on the BB into any folder I like without getting a support bod at work to enable that folder first. I hate it, and wish I could junk the thing.

You can add whatever you want to your own copy of a Linux based product, but adding it to someone else's copy is a different matter entirely. How successful you are depends on the security of the chosen distribution channel and package management. That comes down to implementation. Apple implemented this well, and google have not. Simple as that. It has very little to do with the underlying technology.

What a boring show that was. I gave up on it after the first episode, and I was previously a huge SG fan.

Really? Then you must be deliberately sticking your head in the sand. Probably 50% of my friends, work colleagues and family will freely admit to downloading media from BitTorrent, or sites like Pirate Bay. Some of them very frequently. If the people I know are representative of the wider population, then this is happening on a very large scale. There really is no excuse for it any more. The majority of films and music are available online from several legal online sources.

Different approach my ass. Having just spent 30 mins scanning the site and reading the tutorials I don't see what's all that different to Puppet. On the contrary, the functionality and concepts look strikingly similar, albeit with different terminology, syntax and style. To my eye this looks like a Puppet rip off, though there was a noticeable lack of documentation on how Salt handles run time errors; whether it supports true resource dependency graphing as Puppet does; or even if it has a Puppet style dry-run (noop) mode.

Cobbler (with preseed) I'd agree with. But Puppet and Foreman, for 15-30 laptops is a bit overkill don't you think.

...the one-eyed man is King.

Or maybe that should be blindfolded.

OpenVZ is not the same as the rest. It takes the host O/S and creates skinny containers from it that appear as individual systems; but that's not the same as "virtualization" in this context. You can't run an alternate O/S using OpenVZ.

What you actually said was:

Has anybody here on Slashdot had any experience with one or more of these clustered file systems?

.. and OCFS2 was not on that list. From the rest of your reply it seemed to me that you were confused about the capabilities of OCFS2. My apologies.

The rest of my comments, WRT mdadm etc, we're not related to clustering, or sharing direct attached raid devices between systems - because as others have also said, I don't think that a cluster best suits your requirements. Unless of cause you just want to do it for the fun of it, in which case go for it.

Or alternatively you back everything off to tape (rotating sets) and store them in a fireproof safe.

How is this an answer to your question? You identified 3 cluster filesystem types that protect against hardware loss by distributing the data over a cluster of systems - but OCFS2 isn't like that. It's a filesystem that's designed to provide concurrent shared access to a filesystem by a cluster of servers, which in combination with a HA framework can provide a platform that applications can use to protect against node failure, not disk failure. With OCFS2 you still have to make the storage highly available with a RAID solution plus manage concurrent connectivity via a SAN, iSCSI, etc. So unfortunately this is not an answer to your question at all. The filesystem types you've identified would do what you want, but they're also expensive for a home solution because you have to throw more computers at the problem to increase redundancy and performance.

Have you considered using software RAID (mdadm) on Linux instead of a hardware RAID controller? It has a useful feature that allows you to grow existing raid volumes by adding more disks. Maybe combine that with a small UPS to allow your system to shutdown gracefully in the event of a power failure. Alternatively, if you want to stick with a hardware solution have you taken a look at Drobo? I have no personal experience with Drobo, but from what I've read their proprietary RAID solution allows you to grow your array by just popping new disks in or increase capacity by replacing existing disks with larger ones on the fly. They have a couple of different models that can scale to 16TB. Best of luck with your search.

Not one x86_64 laptop is certified on that list.

Last update for those unixutils tools was 8 years ago. I hope there are no nasty security bugs lurking in there or you've just compromised your entire estate.

Last time I checked my eyeballs didn't work very well with objects. They handle text perfectly well though. Seriously, you're missing the point. The command line is for running commands and eyeballing text output. Bash functions perfectly for this. It's also perfect for writing small quick scripts that do simple tasks. If I need to do something ore complicated that requires an OO approach, then I have python or ruby to play with. Use the right tool for the job.