Somewhere out there!

Some details on upgrading to Feisty from Edgy.

If you run an Ubuntu server, you should use the new server upgrade system. Install update-manager-core:

      sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Launch the upgrade tool:

      sudo do-release-upgrade

Follow the on-screen instructions

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.

Mark Shuttleworth is a really cool guy. Matt Asay has dinner and a conversation with him in London. This and some other insightful comments that should be read.

Core and periphery. Mark said something that I found extremely interesting, and intuitively correct: it’s better to have multiple forks of your project than a single fork. Multiple forks means the community tends to choose between “core” and “periphery.” A single fork means it chooses between two visions of “core,” and you’ll likely lose that battle 50% of the time.

So (and this is my extrapolation, not Mark’s, so blame me if it sounds Sun T’zu-ish), radical openness is in many ways better than semi-openness, because the more you allow your project to be forked, the more value accrues to the core project. This has long benefited Red Hat and SUSE – there are many other Linux distributions, but they’re periphery. What happens, though, if Ubuntu becomes considered “core,” as it gains traction with the development community…?

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

By default Windows Terminal Server is quite annoying when dealing with shortcuts and applications mount from a local file server. A per usual with Windows there is quite a lot of documentation out there with information, although it not all clear.

1. “Site to Zone Assignment List” GPO = trusted site?
2. Site to Zone Assignment List – best method here
3. Behavior of Site to Zone Assignment List
4. The Site to Zone Assignment List policy prevents Internet Explorer from using other zone configuration settings when the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration feature is enabled on a Windows Server 2003 SP1-based computer
5. How to lock down a Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Terminal Server session

Regardless of the above I found the best way to deal in Windows 2003R2 with the GPO was:

Edit the GPO object you wish to apply these settings too. Select [User Configuration\Windows Settings\Internet Explorer Maintenance\Security]. Then double click [Security Zones and Content Ratings], click [Import the current security zones and privacy settings], and then click [Modify Settings]. It should be pretty straight-forward from there. I added my file server sites into Local Intranet, using the form file://uncserver. I found this easy than the “Site to Zone Assignment List” GPO method.

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.

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.