The Inherit Button - What does it do?

[ian351c]

So, I've been using FreeNAS since the 8.x days, and it has recently come to my attention that the ZFS attributes that have an "Inherit" button associated with them in the FreeNAS GUI (atime, compression, etc.) don't actually have an "inherit" value. Usually it's on/off or yes/no. My question is:

If you choose "Inherit" in the GUI, is this a one time thing at creation time that doesn't actually track the changes of the parent ZFS entity?

Thanks.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

If you choose "Inherit" in the GUI, is this a one time thing at creation time that doesn't actually track the changes of the parent ZFS entity?

I just tested this with the atime property, and when I changed it in the parent, it changed in the child too. Don't know if all properties behave this way - I suppose you could try it and see what happens.

 

[ian351c]

Did you change the atime property in the GUI or in the shell with zfs set? I guess that's my question: is this strictly a GUI function that doesn't affect the ZFS filesystems themselves in any way?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I used the GUI.

I think you're misunderstanding the filesystem properties. Here's an example of the atime property on one of my datasets:

Code:

[root@poweredge] ~# zfs get atime pool0/storage/plex
NAME                PROPERTY  VALUE  SOURCE
pool0/storage/plex  atime     off    inherited from pool0

 

[ian351c]

Heh, I got myself really confused. Between some strangeness in the FN10 GUI (the state of the atime property is not always correct in the GUI) and FN9.3 not showing the "SOURCE" field the way FN10 does in a shell and me not figuring out that "inherit" is its own zfs(8) command, not a property of "set", I was totally lost...

It all makes sense now.