A patent filing by Apple, noted by StorageMojo, seems to give credence to the possibility that Apple really will be using ZFS extensively, either in the initial release of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), or in a subsequent release.

Personally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple holds off on using ZFS as the system default filesystem, especially as the boot volume file system, until a 10.5.x release, but still allows it to be used on non-system-volume drives from day one. I am perfectly willing to be happily surprised to learn that I am wrong, however.

This information, however, does make me think that Apple is definitely planning on transitioning away from HFS+, and making that transition apply to upgrade installations as well. This will make many people happy, I think, because nobody likes to do an upgrade via the “re-install everything from scratch and restore my data” way. I was actually wondering if I’d have to do a clean re-install when I finally get my hands on Leopard in order to take advantage of ZFS, but this makes me think I can take the easy way out.

Should be some interesting announcements in the next week.

It occurs to me that I’d love to do a lot of things that I don’t necessarily have time for in the day-to-day grind of work and home life. So, I figured I’d at least start trying to document some of them. Here’s the first one:

Barracuda Spam Firewall Mail Client Plugins

True, Barracuda supplies two plugins for Outlook and a plugin for Lotus Notes, but what about everyone else in the organization? Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Evolution and even Entourage users are left out in the cold. These users can’t take advantage of the nifty “train as spam” or “train as good” buttons which you can invoke on any email in your account. If all the organization’s mail is going through a ‘Cuda anyway, these functions can prove invaluable in increasing the accuracy of the ‘Cuda’s filters.

You don’t even need to be logged in to the Barracuda appliance; it apparently does a simple HTTP request using a base URL the Barracuda tucks into a header of every message it processes. The trick is figuring out what the HTTP request really is. Now, this will really be as easy as forging one of these headers to point to a different URL, and just seeing what the buttons do by watching the server logs (or even just running netcat on the appropriate port). I haven’t gotten around to it yet, because I’ve got lots of “real” work to do, but someday I’ll decode the URL magic.

That’s when the real meat of the project comes in: building plugins/extensions for Thunderbird and Apple Mail. (No, honestly, I don’t really care about Evolution or Entourage.)

That seems to be the scuttlebutt, based on information from various execs at Sun. Apparently Apple’s been so interested in ZFS because they’re planning on making it the default filesystem in OS X Leopard (10.5).

When I first heard that Apple was interested in ZFS, I hoped and prayed that it would come to this. I’m still fervently hoping that Apple really is planning on making ZFS “the” Mac OS X filesystem, because even though HFS+ works, I’ve still never really been entirely comfortable with it. Honestly, ZFS won’t really buy much for the average joe for things like laptops or other single-drive systems, outside of the amazingly better data integrity checking that’s built in, but for multi-drive systems, I think ZFS will really come into its own. A Mac Pro with four 750GB or 1TB hard drives installed is the perfect place for ZFS to be used for both speed and redundancy.

I’m definitely interested to see what will actually come out during the WWDC about Leopard.