Somewhere out there!

Q&A: Jonathan Schwartz on Sun’s open-source business strategy | The Open Road – CNET Blogs:

Why? Think about this: In a year where Sun arguably moved more aggressively to give away more free software than any other company, we grew our software business by 13 percent. It was the fastest-growing business at Sun (and doesn’t even include Solaris, which we don’t yet break out). We pumped out more software last year than we have in the history of the company. We gave it away. And yet our software business grew by 13 percent.

I’m happy this is the case, I think there is room for both Linux and Solaris. The more Sun opens up, the more infrastructure toys there are for us to pay around with! 😀

Some useful info and comments on the Solaris scheduler.

Sun have released their latest Xen update and it looks like it will be one of the key strategic platforms:

And that’s exactly the theory behind the newly bundled virtualization features in Solaris 10 – from Xen to ZFS, Crossbow to Java (fancy names for the same idea – reducing complexity to increase productivity). Solaris 10’s virtualization enables customers to consolidate the sprawling Linux, Solaris and Windows boxes laying around their datacenters, without having to pay exorbitant software licenses for add-on products. We built virtualization in to Solaris 10 not to encourage fewer computer or storage purchases, but instead, more – systems that are twice as utilized are twice as affordable. (When you double the mileage of a car, more people can afford it.)

ZFS keeps improving and now has the ability to delegate zfs administrative tasks to ordinary users.

Two styles of delegated permissions are supported. First the individual permission(s) can be explicitly specified, or the administrator can define a permission set. A permission set can then later be updated and all of the consumers of the set will automatically pick up the change. Permission sets all begin with the letter @ and are limited to 64 characters in length. Characters after the @ sign in a set name have the same restrictions as normal ZFS file system names.

Nice and simply unix style interface, with lots of scripting potential. I can see some usefulness in this once Solaris gets its iscsi stack sorted and I get it going with XenEnterprise.

Permissions are delegated with the allow subcommand to ZFS(1M).

zfs allow [-l] [-d] <"everyone"|user|group>[,<"everyone" |user|group>]  <perm>|@<setname>[,<perm>|@<setname>...] 
<filesystem|volume>
zfs allow [-l] [-d] -u <user> <perm>|@<setname>[,<perm>|@<setname>...] 
<filesystem|volume>
zfs allow [-l] [-d] -g <group> <perm>|@<setname>[,<perm>|@<setname>...] <filesystem|volume>
zfs allow [-l] [-d] -e <perm>|@<setname>[,<perm>|@<setname>...]<filesystem|volume>
zfs allow -c <perm>|@<setname>[,<perm>|@<setname>...] <filesystem|volume>
zfs allow -s @setname <perm>|@<setname>[,<perm>...] <filesystem|volume>

More cool bits from zfs:

After writing this code and testing it, I thought what fun it would be to see it in action on my laptop. I created a new storage pool using a slice on my laptop drive, put a bunch of data on there, then wiped clean the first 1GB of that slice. As you might imagine, any of the file blocks that were unlucky enough to be allocated in that first 1GB were unreadable. However, I could still navigate the entire filesystem, typing “ls”, “rm” and creating new files as much as I wanted. Pretty damn sweet. ZFS just survived a failure scenario that would send any other filesystem to tape. I know you’d have to still go to tape for the file contents that were damaged, but the filesystem was still 100% usable and I could get a list of files that were damaged by running zpool status -v. For the careful reader, you’ll note that this command currently only give you the object number, but it will give you the actual filename in the near future.

They have been working on this for all data and it is now in b61. Google filesystem on your desktop.

Useful look at NFS stat analysis on Solaris.

I’ve been hacking a like bash code to build a replication offline backup system for zfs. Bit of a rough job, but some people might find it useful. Seems though that the iscsi target in Solaris is in a worse state that I realised, so I might have to reconsider Plan Linux. It would be a shame as being able to do stuff like the below is very nice and creates a whole new level of sysadmin ease.

Elektronkind » More Linux/Solaris FUD wars

No breadth? Just what is the breadth that Mr. Zaitcev thinks is missing? Is breadth in this case even quantifiable? Is his supposition based solely on the age old (and aged) driver count argument? Does Mr. Zaitcev think that all Solaris is, is an ancient kernel which happened to have a few new concepts tacked on top of it?

I would bet that if Mr. Zaitcev sat down and tried to use Solaris in a real-world environment, he’d soon learn that Solaris has everything one needs in a data center environment… he just hasn’t discovered them (or read about them, natch) yet for himself. Who knows, perhaps he’d even appreciate them.

Calling this FUD is unkind.

Problem is that Solaris has to convince people to use it, not the reverse. Fancy tech like good marketing gets the eyes balls on the game, but unless the first 30 seconds give people enough to ride out the next 30 days using Solaris then there is going to be lots of comments like Pete Zaitcevs.

I know, I’ve spend the last several weeks learning Opensolaris while putting together a zfs iscsi storage server. It is not easy. I feel like I’m stuck in the 90s compared to the easy at which I can set up any Linux solution.  Even with the new tech it is not all plain sailing, zfs on Opensolaris is cutting edge code. The core system of course are stable, other the interest new bits flaky constantly.  Unfortunately these are the bits that make Solaris worth looking at, without a good stable iscsi on zfs system its better for me to look at DRDB on Linux.

Technorati Tags: solaris, zfs, linux

Some notes for doing a BFU in Opensolaris. I find the best way to try a BFU is by combining with a Live Updated slice then can be a useful way for testing new functionality while still keeping the existing system as a fall back. The information below is summarised from Ben Rockwood and Omer Faruk Sen.

BFU: Blindingly Fast Update or Bonwick/Faulkner Update (or sometimes called as Big F* Update) which is a set of cpio archives that directly installs contents of cpio to / without UPDATING package database. So it will break pkg environment and you can’t and shouldn’t use patch* or pkg* commands because you get LOTS of mismatched md5sums.

First thing is to download, unpack and install the build tools and current BFU archive from the opensolaris site. At this point you are looking for SUNWonbld-20070409.i386.tar.bz2 and on-bfu-20070409.i386.tar.bz2.

zfs create ztank/bfu
cd /ztank/bfu/
bzcat SUNWonbld-20070409.i386.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
cd onbld/
pkgadd -d . SUNWonbld
cd ..
bzcat on-bfu-20070409.i386.tar.bz2 | tar xf -

Then run the BFU tool:

export FASTFS=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/fastfs
export BFULD=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/bfuld
export GZIPBIN=/usr/bin/gzip
export PATH=/opt/onbld/bin:/opt/onbld/bin/i386:$PATH
bfu /ztank/bfu/archives-20070409/i386/

Finally at the bfu# prompt run the ACR (Automatic Conflict Resolution) tool:


bfu# /opt/onbld/bin/acr


After that is complete you should check in /bfu.conflicts/ to see if there are any files that the ACR missed. Then reboot with:

sync;sync;sync;shutdown -y -g0 -i6


Some clever tips for using

Samba with ZFS.