FAQ

How can I test the notifications?

Redirect a copy of the output of the zpool status command to a file and change zfswatcher.conf as follows:

zpoolstatuscmd = "cat /tmp/zpool-status.txt"

Then reload the configuration and edit the text file to trigger notifications.

Why GPLv3 license?

Because we want to keep this project and any improvements open sourced. This way anyone who chooses to build on this software will have to release their improvements under the same license. GPLv3 addresses some loopholes which are present in GPLv2.

Why parsing ZFS command output instead of linking to ZFS libraries?

This approach makes it simple to distribute binary packages which are not bound to a specific version of ZoL. If we link to the libraries, we would have to make binary packages which depend on specific version of ZoL.

Also ZFS on Linux developers do not recommend linking to the ZFS libraries. See the following discussion thread:

https://groups.google.com/a/zfsonlinux.org/d/topic/zfs-devel/AiEi96Kde-k/discussion

This way we can also ignore any license incompatibility issues.

This can be changed later if there is a clear need to do so.

Why is the software implemented in Go instead of some other programming language?

Because Go is cooler.