At work I'll download an image and then take a couple minutes to find it in the huge "Pictures" folder because it was "last modified" some time in 2023.

Of course some filesystems don't support creation time. But the ones most commonly used on Linux today (ext4/btrfs/XFS/ZFS) do, as does Windows's NTFS and Mac's APFS.

I am looking into the 'RPC wait' for node getData with a named node. I am trying to understand how this error message works, and the internals of what it means.

Update 10/13/25:

Well it's kinda opaque how this all works. It also seems like there are a couple possible reasons for why this could be happening. It was not clear to me if there is a way to tell, in the abstract, which one without looking at node logs.

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“ZFS and Better File System (Btrfs) are two popular modern file systems. Both are designed with advanced storage features and offer snapshot capabilities, data integrity protection, and highly efficient storage management. However, ZFS has been the more reliable option for both personal and enterprise-level usage.”

I found this interesting as I did try a switch to Btrfs myself a while ago, but seem to remember I had speed issues as well as an inflated storage requirement. I liked the concept though. It is something I want to revisit in the future again, but I’ll probably give ZFS a more serious consideration then.

Right now I’m back on EXT4 with daily mirrored backups to two separate locations, and a selected cloud backup of critical data.

You can actually try IBM Storage Scale for free–obviously there are limits, but you can certainly get a sense of how it all works. To that end I was pulling apart the installer the other day and noticed that I couldn't find mmdiag.

I was confused by this–until I unpacked the .deb file and looked at the post install script. As it turns out IBM makes liberal use of symlinks and mmdiag is just a symlink to tsdiag. I wanted to document that here–so I don't forget and in case anyone else finds themselves needlessly puzzled. I also posted a list of the symlinks I found in the GPFS Base .deb file here.

You can download the source here: