I’ve taken quite a hiatus from this blog – I’ve been working on a new project that has been consuming most of my time these days. After much consternation, I’ve gotten Solaris Nevada (build 77) up and running on my “ancient” Shuttle PC. I got it nearly three years ago – back when a single-core AMD 2200+ was decent, and you didn’t need more than a gig of RAM for most things. It was a Windows box for most of that time, and sat buried in my closet, or hooked to my television – powered off. Now it’s running Solaris and ZFS, and the CoolStack packages.

So, I slapped a pair of 80GB SATA drives in it, and went to work. The vfe drivers got it online, and the USB card reader that came with it magically worked. Wireless still is a no-go, but it’s really the least of my concerns. I’m still trying to find a cheap PCI SATA card that will work in Solaris and won’t break the bank. It’s hard, because I’ve only got a single, standard PCI slot – not PCI-X, PCIe, or what have you.

Next, I installed timf’s zfs-auto-snapshot SMF service, fired up Samba, and started using it pretty heavily as a test bed for network services – including TimeMachine (by setting TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes in OSX). It’s fast and it’s stable, and I love it.

As a bit of advice for doing this – you probably want to turn on file system compression within ZFS when using it for TimeMachine – large chunks of the backup will compress pretty well. To enable:

/opt/csw/bin/sudo zfs set compression=on tank/filesystemname

Right now, I’m seeing 1.38:1 compression, which isn’t bad – especially considering that the backups I do have are filling 43 GB of space – that’s 60GB of “raw” data – and it covers 4 weeks of incremental time machine backups. Also – you probably don’t want to enable auto snapshots on this volume – TimMachine is already doing it for you, in it’s own (relatively) inefficient way.

That’s all for now, but there’s more to come…

Cool tutorial on how to fake tilt and shift lenses in Photoshop.

Looks like that worked – the main page now is a redirect from http://www.gurucollege.net/ to http://www.gurucollege.net/pix/, which is a fine adjustment to make. I figured that most of the people who come to this blog are family and friends, not so much concerned with my UNIX systems admin posts – and that they are here for the pictures. And sadly, the google analytics data backs it all up. So it’s all switched over.

That’s not to suggest that this blog is going anywhere but up. What I need now is a clever way to let people set preferences on where they want to navigate to by default…

I’m going to be switching the photoblog and the text part of this blog around again – so the photoblog is what loads when you land on http://www.gurucollege.net. The old address for the photoblog will still be valid – http://www.gurucollege.net/pix/, and the text part will move to http://www.gurucollege.net/blog/. I’ll be making this change as soon as I have a free hour or so to troubleshoot – probably on the afternoon of the 1st or the morning of the 2nd. I wanted to give everyone some fair warning about the move, so they have a chance to update their bookmarks.

DNS is critial for the proper functioning of LDAP, ActiveDirectory, OpenDirectory, EMail and SSL, and to a lesser extent, things like Apache. There’s a bit you need to know about DNS as a server administrator, and things you need to know working in IT. Here is what you need to have a self contained system – and it’s easier than you think.

I’m using MaraDNS, on an Ubuntu VM, inside of VMWare Fusion. Simple configuration, simple management, lots of speed, and a measure of security. To get a basic recursive DNS server running, all you need is a 3 line config file, and to host a domain, a pair of config files (one of them 4 lines, the other as few as 1 line). And yes, it really is that easy to run a DNS server. I’ve got mine setup at home already, using the domain homelan.lab as to not have it confuse my home network with the internet.

Just wanting to wish everyone a very merry Christmas!

I mentioned in my first Virtual Data Center post that I was setting up a “Fake Thumper”. It’s been pointed out to me that it’s really not needed, and somewhat foolish to do things that way. It would be a good way to stage a production environment – as long as you don’t use more disk space than you actually have. For example, to make a true Fake Thumper, you’d make 48 x 500 GB virtual disks. However, the mkfile -n trick I had been using doesn’t work well in VMWare – my ZFS pools kept on corrupting themselves. So, I’ve just attached 3 x 20 GB vdisks, and added them. Seems to be working just fine. The great thing about ZFS is the fact that it scales – I can easily create another 3 20 GB disks in VMWare, add them as another set, and my pool has grown to 80 GB.

The fun part begins, though, with this entry on the OpenSolaris CIFS server page – the 4 command version of getting the in-kernel CIFS server online for doing windows-friendly file services.

`I mentioned in my first Virtual Data Center post that I was setting up a “Fake Thumper”. It’s been pointed out to me that it’s really not needed, and somewhat foolish to do things that way. It would be a good way to stage a production environment – as long as you don’t use more disk space than you actually have. For example, to make a true Fake Thumper, you’d make 48 x 500 GB virtual disks. However, the mkfile -n trick I had been using doesn’t work well in VMWare – my ZFS pools kept on corrupting themselves. So, I’ve just attached 3 x 20 GB vdisks, and added them. Seems to be working just fine. The great thing about ZFS is the fact that it scales – I can easily create another 3 20 GB disks in VMWare, add them as another set, and my pool has grown to 80 GB.

The fun part begins, though, with this entry on the OpenSolaris CIFS server page – the 4 command version of getting the in-kernel CIFS server online for doing windows-friendly file services.

`

And with this, you get snapshot capable file services. One more command, and the same shrepoint is available over NFS – just use “sharenfs=on” in the 2nd line of the config. This, of course, doesn’t cover the process of binding to Active Directory – I haven’t gotten that far into this setup yet to have or need AD.