Tag Archives: OSS

Google’s Nexus One smartphone – not your ordinary innovation

Posted on by
Reply
Nexus One's home page

Owner of copyright: Schierlitz & Budewig, Tom Schierlitz photographer.

To much fanfare, Google released the Nexus One smartphone earlier this month. Some may say that the Nexus One doesn’t compare against the iPhone, and I have to respectfully disagree on that point.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of the Apple iPhone + iTunes model. I think Apple has done a really good job in delivering an excellent end-to-end consumer smartphone experience. Integration with iTunes  and the App store, the intuitive user interface and the form factor have all set the benchmark by which all other smartphones are compared to.

But the real genius behind the Nexus One phone is not in the hardware or the software. The real genius is in the business model : the Google Store and the power of Open Source.

Continue reading →

Setting up OpenSolaris 2009.06 – some hints

Posted on by
Reply

Some brief ideas:

1. Set up VNC using the built-in OpenSolaris VNC server. Tim Thomas blogs on how it’s done –> Simply edit nano /etc/x11/gdm/custom.conf. Then ensure that xvnc-inetd is spawned on startup: svcadm enable xvnc-inetd. Then respawn xvnc-inetd and gdm: svcadm disable xvnc-inetd gdm ; svcadm enable xvnc-inetd gdm

2. Set up CIFS file sharing with the built-in OpenSolaris CIFS server. Sun’s Developer Network has a recipe for Solaris 10 –> but OpenSolaris doesn’t have the kernel module pre-installed, so you have to go pkg install SUNWsmbskr ; pkg install SUNWsmbs. Once you have that installed, enable it, allow users to login and you’re done: svcadm enable -r smb/server ; echo “other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn” >> /etc/pam.conf

For every $1 spent on licenses, an additional $1.25 is spent on value added services

Posted on by
Reply

A recent IDC report on piracy in Brunei states that for every $1.00 spent on software licenses, an additional $1.25 is also spent in value added services.

Why is this important to us? And why is an OSS friendly guy blogging about software licenses?

Turn the equation around.

More after the break:

Continue reading →

Replacing an EACS drive for an EADS

Posted on by
Reply

So the shop somehow managed to deliver my custom PC with 2x EADS drives and 1x EACS drive. Normally, to rectify this kind of mishap would require backing up the data on the drive and restoring the data to the replacement disk.

Not so with ZFS. Because my three drives are in a raidz storage pool, ZFS automatically partitions and manages my data. This allows up to one device in the pool to fail (single parity).

Replacing the drive was a case of:

1. Pulling out the old disk.
2. Cabling up the new disk in the, now-empty slot.
3. Booting the OS as normal.
4. Resilvering the raidz zpool with a single command: zpool replace <name of device to replace>
5. Go get coffee, rebuilding the array will take some time. Once it’s done, check status with: zpool status

After the break I give some examples of what you may see:

Continue reading →

ZFS to the rescue

Posted on by
Reply

ZFS saved my data!

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status -x
pool: tank
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using ‘zpool clear’ or replace the device with ‘zpool replace’.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: scrub completed after 0h44m with 0 errors on Thu Feb 12 13:27:23 2009
config:

NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
tank        ONLINE       0     0     0
raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
c5d1    ONLINE       0     0     0
c6d0    ONLINE       2     0     0  128K repaired
c6d1    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
root@opensolaris:~#

I wonder if this is a symptom of poor PSU performance? I’ll be monitoring that disk c6d0 (SATA3).

Risk = Crisis + Opportunity

Posted on by
Reply

In a “zero-sum game“, there is always one loser and one winner. Just like in a game of poker, what one party wins, the other party loses. I’ve been reading a lot about the economic downturn lately and it reminded me of a conversation I had with one of the chaps at the office –> The Chinese character for “Risk” is written as = Crisis + Opportunity.

So – in these times of economic downturn and crisis, who stands to gain? Sun Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogs:

In the midst of this economic downturn, discussions related to free and
open source software have substantially heated up - this is no longer a
peripheral discussion with CIO's - cost reduction related to open
source adoption has become a focal point for decision makers across the
world.

I also found this gem of an article about a hedge fund manager who bet big on the eventual credit crunch and failure of large financial services institutions.

This really shows two completely opposite ways to squeeze an opportunity out of these current crisis. Either (1) through leveraging on cost efficiencies and delivering a lower TCO product than the competition and competing on price, or (2) winning through zero-sum games on the way the market is going to go. John Paulson made a filthy amount of return on (2), although at a staggering amount of risk. The jury is still out – whether Sun can pull the fat from the fire and turn around that great company and really make a comeback.

Seamless upgrades with OpenSolaris & ZFS

Posted on by
Reply

One other benefit of using ZFS and it’s ability to take snapshots of an entire filesystems … is that I can upgrade my boot environment inside a clone of my existing system. If I have problems, I can always roll back with a single command line.

Those days of maintaining a 2nd set of hardware for testing operating system patches may be numbered!

[see: OpenSolaris getting started guide, and OpenSolaris Boot Environments docs] Continue reading →

Somewhere … a Windows file server just cried a little inside

Posted on by
Reply

snapshot01

This is a screen shot of my OpenSolaris install. I created an approx. 2,000 GB storage pool out of 3x 1TB hard disk drives. You’d think it should add up to 3,000 GB of storage … but one of the disks is being used to provide redundancy to the pool. My data is being spread out over 3x disks, so now, if one of the disks fails, I can easily replace it with any disk of similar capacity and OpenSolaris will automatically recover my data for me.

The real cool part? After copying all my data across to the new storage pool, I took a backup of the data using a single command, zfs snapshot -r tank/share@20090205

This is all made possible by the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) feature in OpenSolaris, an open source project from Sun Microsystems.

Somewhere there’s a sysadmin slaving over some tape backups or wrestling with logical volume management, manually copying old data over to new disks. ZFS takes manageability of disk resources to a whole new level of simplicity. Adding more space to the pool is simply a matter of unboxing the new drives, connecting them and adding them to the pool. The pool automatically grows larger to accommodate the new disks and data is magically spread over the new enalrged pool.

ZFS – Finally back on OpenSolaris

Posted on by
Reply

Havoc! Let me summarise my long list of problems with my custom PC. The spec is roughly:

  • ASUS P5KPL-AM Motherboard, with Intel Core2Duo processor
  • 3x Western Digital 1TB hard drives, WD10EADS (SATA)
  • 1x Western Digital WD160GB, SATAIII HDD,
  • DVD burner and USB card reader mounted internally
  • 400 W PSU, 2x additional case fans

A little summary of my troubles after the break:

Continue reading →