Archive for January, 2009

FreeBSD with ZFS

// January 30th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Technology

So I got FreeBSD 7.1 w/ ZFS on my root file system working like a charm.

I followed the instructions at www.ish.com.au, with some exceptions, which follow after the break.

The cool thing? 1,860 GB of storage space. 930 GB of disk space is being used for automatic ZFS backups (the checksums) to protect my data. Total = 2,790 GB.

Total spent = around B$1,250.

This is 67 cents per gigabyte of better than RAID-5 protected storage. With a CPU thrown in to boot! haha.

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OpenSolaris vs FreeBSD .. .which do I go for?

// January 30th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Technology

Dilemma! I’m setting up a home NAS … but do I return to my FreeBSD roots or shall I try something new and go with OpenSolaris?

Both are Open Source, both have excellent communities etc. And most importantly? Both have ZFS.

Well, my Dad always told me to be systematic! A clear mind = a clear purpose. So a small comparison follows after the break …

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OpenSolaris with a raid-z array, Part2

// January 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

Here is my attempt to install OpenSolaris on 3x 4GB drives in a virtualised environment. This did not go well at all! My virtualised environment could not boot because I used the wrong commands in Step 3 and overwrote the wrong partition information. I’ve left this here for my own personal records.

Part of the problem is that OpenSolaris does not really support using sub-partitions within a hard disk, and I was trying to do with creating a raid-z array without a fourth disk for my zfs rpool.

In the end because I was targeting the wrong slices, my OpenSolaris ended up unbootable.

DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS UNLESS YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

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OpenSolaris with a raid-z array, Part1

// January 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

The documentation for ZFS and OpenSolaris seems “technically correct” in a kind of austere fashion … but I haven’t found some “dumbed-down” simplified documentation for OpenSolaris newbies like there are for Linux/FreeBSD equivalents. Reading the Solaris/OpenSolaris docs, I get this aura that  Solaris/OpenSolaris is engineered in a real professional manner, and it just “seems to work” the way you expect it to after digesting the technical documents. So maybe that is why there’s not as much “newbie friendly” docs.

ZFS is exciting because it is a whole new way of administrating storage. I can have 3x 1 terrabyte disk drives set up in a redundant fashion, giving me 2 TB’s of storage space and using 1 disk for redundancy. ZFS is an enterprise-grade technology that does all kinds of data checking while making it much easier to manage my storage devices. And the really coot part? When it comes to upgrading to bigger disks, I just swap the disks in one by one and let ZFS’s self-healing techniques expand the array.

Check out Sun’s own materials: “ZFS – the last word in file systems“.

And by the way … OpenSolaris is a kind of a “Beta” for Solaris 11. It seems that Solaris 11 will be based on the OpenSolaris code, so heads up, if you want to get ahead of the curve with Solaris technology, you may want to get skills with OpenSolaris now 8-)

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Sun’s xVM VirtualBox

// January 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

My experiment in using Fedora 10’s built-in virtualisation technology  (based on KVM and qemu / kqemu) to install OpenSolaris didn’t go too well! I find the emulator to be just too slow for my taste, but I’m not sure if I had it configured properly.

So I installed Sun’s VirtualBox instead. As you can see I have it running 2x virtual machines: an Ubuntu Server 8.04LTS VM and an OpenSolaris 2008.11 VM. Both are installing concurrently, and my machine seems to be holding up ok (Load average is around 2 to 3 … I hit 11 earlier on while creating the disk images yikes).

So … try out virtualisation with Fedora’s built-in tools. But be mindful that they seem to work best when virtualising  Linux / Fedora. It’s very slick if you want to create lots of mini-Fedora’s in your main Fedora install. This is a boon for developers who like to tweak their systems, this gives you a sandbox within which you can do what you like without harming your main Fedora install.

If you have slightly different requirements you may want to try VirtualBox. Be careful though! VirtualBox’s license prohibits certain uses, so for hardcore server virtualisation heavy-duty workloads you’ll probably want to use KVM and qemu / kqemu after you’ve tested it out with your VirtualBox on localhost.

sunxvmvirtualbox

Installing OpenSolaris 2008.11 in a virtual machine within Fedora 10 (or any Linux with KVM)

// January 20th, 2009 // Comments Off // Technology

I need to set up some OpenSolaris servers for a pet project, and so I can educate myself about the ins and outs of OpenSolaris. I don’t have lots of server hardware lying around spare and I don’t want to destroy my existing Fedora 10 setup, so I’ll just use my Dell laptop and create some virtual machines to play around with.

Tip: The actual OpenSolaris install can take a while! Bring a magazine …

Before we start, you’ll need: The OpenSolaris CD. I downloaded the ISO from BitTorrent, and burned a CD on my iMac. And one Linux with KVM. KVM is now the default bundled virtualisation technology in both Ubuntu and Fedora.

Update: After going on this grand experiment, I eventually went with Sun’s VirtualBox virtualisation tool. For desktop and enterprise server virtualisation the Sun solution might be better. Your mileage may vary, but after some experiments, I found the Fedora 10 built-in virtualisation tools were best for virtualising Linux workloads.

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Shouting at your disk array is not supported

// January 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

The power of OpenSolaris, with DTrace. A more detailed analysis follows in a Sun blog and a cnet article.

OpenSolaris is downloadable for free from Sun Microsystems. It is a cutting edge open source Unix with some very nice features: ZFS (Zetabyte file system, more on this one in another blog post), DTrace (which you see here doing interactive system performance analysis) and Containers (a kind of virtualisation similar to FreeBSD’s jails that allows you to run many Solarises on a single Solaris.)

Should .gov promote/fund universal deployment of network infra?

// January 12th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Business

Again through Wired Magazine, I came across some excellent articles from a blog written by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA).

Let me give you a few quotes:

From “Top ten things lawyers should know about internet research #10:

It is thus in interest of taxpayers for governments to promote and sometimes directly fund universal deployment of network infrastructure. More generally, government needs to prevent monopoly control over essential resources, mandate collection of traffic reports from ISPs to validate their claims, be a better role model for operational security, and coordinate the development of a roadmap for Internet security similar to that of the energy sector (DHS is working on this last one).

from the same post:

We can learn from our mistakes. The false assumption that competing members of a profit-maximizing ecosystem will cooperate toward architectural innovations not in their short-term interest is remarkably consistent across failed attempts to solve major problems of the Internet (e.g., ATM, multicast, routing security, IPv6, DNSSEC, QOS).

Perhaps this is the best part:

Expecting the private sector to navigate these dimensions (security, scalability, sustainability, and stewardship) while subject to relentless pressure to minimize costs is a recipe for failure; even public-private partnerships are not free of these pressures.

Some analysis of how this can be applied in Brunei’s context after the jump:

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