Somewhere out there!

A difficult question to google. In Solaris nodename is “the common name of the system regardless of how many hostnames the system really has.”

So each /etc/hostname.{if} interface file might have a different hostname associated with it, but /etc/nodename is the primary name.

From Ben.

From the Register, Sun to fry NetApp with FISH:

Sun Microsystems has a near-term NetApp assault in store code-named ‘FISHworks.’The FISH stands for “Fully Integrated Software and Hardware” and comes from work done by some of Sun’s top software engineers over the past year.

The first run of the technology will see Sun bundle Solaris, the ZFS file system, DTrace and a number of other software packages together on a NAS (network attached storage)-like hardware system. Sun hopes to kick NetApp where it hurts, banking on the theory that no one wants a complex, proprietary storage OS in this day and age.

This sounds pretty interesting. I’d probably pay some money for a blackbox software appliance from Sun with zfs, iscsi, cifs (samba) and nfs that just worked and I could install on a given piece of x86 hardware. Unfortunately it’ll probablybe for Sun hardware only, which will likely price it out of a usable range.

Technorati Tags: zfs, storage

b62 is probably a couple months away, so I’m no doubt going to have to learn how to BFU solaris before I can try out zfs booting. However when I do it should be easier to go further: Friday fun with BFU and ZFS root. Also a script to automate the grub and zfs booting process.

Technorati Tags: solaris, zfs

ZFS Boot is going to make things a lot to try out with Opensolaris. Snapshot based system upgrades is a very interesting feature.

Technorati Tags: zfs

I really respect Jonathan Schwartz, he has made Sun and Solaris worth considering again. He seems to combined the best qualities of a visionary big company leader who understands technology. A geek who can explain things to big business. Not an straight-forward combination.

For along time Sun was the heart of Unix, but with the advent of GNU+Linux and building of the open-source community in the late 90s Sun has fallen well behind the innovation cycle. Currently people do not (in general) create and use products like Xen, Zimbra, Alfresco, or Asterisk on Solaris. Companies like Google and Paypal use Linux at the edge to drive deployment and increase their innovation productivity, maybe leaving Solaris to the backend traditional well-structured heavy loads.

Zfs is moving pretty quickly. milek’s blog: ZFS online replication

Technorati Tags: zfs, replication

Discussion on the pros and cons of raid-z vs mirroring: WHEN TO (AND NOT TO) USE RAID-Z from Bizarre ! Vous avez dit Bizarre.

Technorati Tags: zfs, solaris, raid

Useful zfs guide: ZFS Best Practices Guide.

Technorati Tags: zfs, solaris

I just installed Nexenta and I’ve been playing around with zfs. I must say the basic replication system is very cool. Seems to work for zvols as well. Remotely replicated iscsi volumes and nfs data sets, is going to make my backups trivial.

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# ls -l /tank/test2/
total 104
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104000 Feb 24 00:54 random
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104857600 Feb 24 01:00 random2

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# rm random2
root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs snapshot tank/test@10:00pm

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs send -i tank/test@9:59pm tank/test@10:00pm | zfs receive tank/test2@10:00pm
cannot receive: destination has been modified since most recent snapshot

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs rollback -r tank/test2@9:59pm
root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs send -i tank/test@9:59pm tank/test@10:00pm | zfs receive tank/test2@10:00pm
root@hzsilo:/tank/test# ls -l /tank/test2/
total 103
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 104000 Feb 24 00:54 random

For those of you who might have missed it, the send receive pipe could have a ‘ssh -C’ part as well. Brilliant. Plus because of the snapshots the deleted data is still there. The whole rollback thing is probably because of atime from the ls.

Some other stats from Wikipedia:

• 2⁴⁸ — Number of snapshots in any file system (2 × 10¹⁴)
• 2⁴⁸ — Number of files in any individual file system (2 × 10¹⁴)
• 16 exabytes (2⁶⁴ byte) — Maximum size of a file system
• 16 exabytes (2⁶⁴ byte) — Maximum size of a single file
• 16 exabytes (2⁶⁴ byte) — Maximum size of any attribute
• 3 × 10²³ petabytes — Maximum size of any zpool
• 2⁵⁶ — Number of attributes of a file (actually constrained to 2⁴⁸ for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
• 2⁵⁶ — Number of files in a directory (actually constrained to 2⁴⁸ for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
• 2⁶⁴ — Number of devices in any zpool
• 2⁶⁴ — Number of zpools in a system
• 2⁶⁴ — Number of file systems in a zpool

With that many snapshots possible you could almost have continue data protection. Even with 100 objects to snapshot at one per mintue; 144,000 snapshots, per day, it will be a long time before any limits are reached.

Technorati Tags: solaris, zfs

Sun’s released ZFS for OpenSolarias and it looks very cool. Couple of flash demos show how easy it is to manage and its selfhealing abilities.

It would be very interesting to see the possibilities of this combined with OpenSolarias acting as a dom0.