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…