Solaris-Express on sigtar.com

nsswitch.conf SMF config

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +1200

# svccfg svc:> select dns/client svc:/network/dns/client> setprop config/search = astring: \ (“us.company.com” “eu.company.com” “companya.com” “companyb.com” “company.com” ) svc:/network/dns/client> setprop config/nameserver = net_address: \ ( 138.2.202.15 138.2.202.25 ) svc:/network/dns/client> select dns/client:default svc:/network/dns/client:default> refresh svc:/network/dns/client:default> validate svc:/network/dns/client:default> select name-service/switch svc:/system/name-service/switch> setprop config/host = astring: “files dns” svc:/system/name-service/switch> select system/name-service/switch:default svc:/system/name-service/switch:default> refresh svc:/system/name-service/switch:default> validate svc:/system/name-service/switch:default> # svcadm enable dns/client # svcadm refresh name-service/switch # grep host /etc/nsswitch.conf hosts: files dns # cat /etc/resolv.conf # # opyright (c) 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. #

zfs share for Time machine backups

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve tried using a share for time machine before, but due to the nature of how time machine works it eventually consumed all the spare space that is available on that particular share.

bring on zfs quotas… (my drive on my mini mac is 100GB, so 200GB should be enough for a few variations)

zfs set quota=200G unprotected/timemachine

This adds a artificial limit to your zfs filesystem, making sure that time machine does not consume more than 200 gigabytes of space.

opensolaris - setting up dhcp

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +1300

You’ll need these two packages installed;

SUNWdhcs, SUNWdhcm

First ensure that the DHCP service is running. Go into the “services” gui and tick the box to enable the DHCP server.

now from commandline run…

dhcpmgr

From edit menu choose “network wizard”, step through the wizard (defautls are o.k i you have a fixed IP already assigned to your opensolaris box)
From edit menu choose “address wizard”

If you step through the wizard (the following is an example of what i have choosen)

solaris - storage server

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +1200

http://p2v.it/2010/04/15/a-next-generation-multiprotocol-storage-for-your-homelab-on-a-budget-part-1/

Setup iSCSI target using comstar – pkg install -v storage-server pkg install pkg:/SUNWiscsit svcadm enable stmf svcadm enable svc:/network/iscsi/target:default itadm create-target reboot – -r

Create the iSCSI store — zfs create -V 100G DataPool/TestDatastore1 sbdadm create-lu /dev/zvol/rdsk/DataPool/TestDatastore1 stmfadm create-hg ESX4-group stmfadm add-hg-member -g ESX4-group wwn.2100001b329711bd wwn.2101001b32b711bd stmfadm add-view -h ESX4-group -n 0 600144F03EBEC50000004BA86E460001 stmfadm list-lu -v

install crashplan on solaris

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +1200

http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/getting_started/installing_crashplan

Move the downloaded tar.gz file into /var/spool/pkg/

mv CrashPlan_2010-03-08_Solaris.tar.gz /var/spool/pkg/

Unpack the archive.

tar -xzvf CrashPlan_2010-03-08_Solaris.tar.gz

Install the CrashPlan package:

sudo /usr/sbin/pkgadd

Start CrashPlan Engine:

sudo /opt/sfw/crashplan/bin/CrashPlanEngine start

Start CrashPlan Desktop:

sudo /opt/sfw/crashplan/bin/CrashPlanDesktop

To enable CrashPlan PRO as a service (as root):

svccfg import /opt/sfw/crashplan/bin/crashplan.xml

svcadm enable crashplan

check that the service has come online proplery (then load client)

svcs -a | grep crashplan

online 21:18:43 svc:/crashplan:default

email alerts on zpool failure

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +1200

simple but functional script to check if your zpools are healthy and send email if they are not…

http://blog.qcnetwork.com/2011/03/monitoring-zpool-with-email-alert.html

zfs : accidentally adding cache drive to raidz zpool

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 +1200

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=23127

Unfortunately if you have accidentally added a single drive into your raidz pool at the top-level there is no way to just remove the non redundant disk. Your pool is now dependant on this disk.

If you want your pool to be just raidz vdevs, then you will need to backup your data, destroy your pool, create a new pool, and restore your data.

There is no current way to remove a top-level vdev from a pool.

opensolaris - check syslog

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +1300

dmesg | tail

Shows the last few entries in the system log.

OpenSolaris is Dead

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +1300

http://sstallion.blogspot.com/2010/08/opensolaris-is-dead.html

OpenSolaris is Dead.

What follows is an email sent internally to Oracle Solaris Engineers which describes Oracle’s true intentions toward the OpenSolaris project and the future of Oracle Solaris.

This concludes over four years that I (and many other external contributors) have worked on the OpenSolaris project. This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work - for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis.

I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company’s bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit.

opensolaris - increase swap

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1200

I found this on opensolaris forums…. A nice way to increase your swap without the need for a reboot.

First check your current swap size and details;

swap -lh

zfs list

Then create a temp swap zfs store and delete and increase swap

zfs create -V rpool/swp

swap -a /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swp

swap -d /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap

zfs destroy rpool/swap

zfs create -V rpool/swap

swap -a /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap

swap -d /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swp

zfs destroy rpool/swp

OpenSolaris on HP server

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1200

A nice easy post by Evgeniy on getting opensolaris on HP kit….

http://www.eject.name/2009/07/opensolaris-and-hp-smartarray.html

4k sector hard drives and zfs

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +1200

I hit this as a problem recently. One of my disks died in my raidz so i ran down to the store and grabbed me a replacement WD10EARS (Western Digital 1Tb Green) drive.

BUT…

The one thing the store didn’t mention to me is the new 4K cluster sizing on the drive. I guess they assume most people run windows (though the issues are also present in XP). See these posts…

opensolaris - pkg verify

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:00:00 +1200

I ran through a pkg verify the other day and came across a lot of errors. Running the subsequent pkg fix command presented me with this…

pkg: Requested “install” operation would affect files that cannot be modified in live image.

Please retry this operation on an alternate boot environment.

This is the fix….

mkdir /mnt/osol-134fix beadm create osol-134fix beadm mount osol-134fix /mnt/osol-134fix pkg -R /mnt/osol-134fix fix –accept beadm activate osol-134fix

opensolaris - default route

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 +1200

type the following to check your default routes…

netstat -rn

opensolaris v134 - CIFS has gone walkies

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +1200

Errr, I cant find the CIFS service in the 134 build.

I know it was renamed to as per below but still cant see it anywhere?

> system/file-system/smb (was SUNWsmbfs*) > service/file-system/smb (was SUNWsmbs*)

Anyone have any ideas?

pkg search *smb gets me these… but i cant install them.

require depend service/file-system/smb@0.5.11-0.134 pkg:/redistributable@0.1-0.134 require depend service/file-system/smb@0.5.11-0.134 pkg:/storage/storage-server@0.1-0.134 require depend service/file-system/smb@0.5.11-0.134 pkg:/system/security/kerberos-5@0.5.11-0.134 require depend service/file-system/smb@0.5.11-0.134 pkg:/storage/storage-nas@0.1-0.134 require depend system/file-system/smb@0.5.11-0.134 pkg:/redistributable@0.1-0.134 require depend system/file-system/smb@0.5.11-0.134 pkg:/storage/storage-server@0.1-0.134 require depend system/file-system/smb@0.5.11-0.134 pkg:/slim_install@0.1-0.134

zfs - now has dedup!

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +1200

Cool. zfs as of version 21 has deduplication built in. And thats the good dedup - synchronous dedup. i.e. deduped on the fly!

How easy is it to turn on? - very!

Once you have upgraded your zpool to 21 or above you can run the following command at the pool level and deduplication will be over all your data from that point onwards.

zpool set dedup=on tank

Done

Note : Watch your performance, it will drop like a rock if you do not have enough ram for your dedup tables. Do some tests after enabling this feature.

OpenSolaris - iSCSI

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +1300

Want iSCSI in opensolaris?

Grab SUNWiscsitgt via package manager.

enable the server via svcadm;

svcadm enable iscsitgt

create your zfs iscsi pool; (this command will limit iscsi drive to 500GB in size)

zfs create -V 500G tank/iscsi

set isci on via zfs command;

zfs set shareiscsi=on tank/iscsi

check that target is up and running;

iscsitadm list target -v

Done. Should be able to connect via ip from another machine. I have not covered CHAP or any client side configuration. Assumed isolated LAN.

Opensolaris - ZFS recovery after kernel panic

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1300

Recently i hit what i thought was a huge disaster with my ZFS array. Essentially i was unable to import my zpool without causing the kernel to panic and reboot. Still unsure of the exact reason, but it didn’t seem to be due to a hardware fault. (zpool import showed all disks as ONLINE)

When i tried to import with zpool import -f tank the machine would lockup and reboot (panic).

Opensolaris - white screen on logon

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1300

I had this problem when i enabled 3d effects on my server. The screen just goes white and you cannot see anything. Even after a reboot as soon as you logon to gnome the screen goes white.

To fix you’ll need to logon using a “failsafe terminal” session, then run gnome-cleanup from the command line. This will blow away any of your gnome settings (although they are actually backed up to a file), but it’ll mean you’ll be able to logon again without issue.

Opensolaris - Samba and Network browsing

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1200

If you’ve setup samba (rather than the builtin cifs/smb) chances are that you can only browse to your samba shares directly on IP only.

If you want your box “network browseable” you’ll need to load nmbd.

You can find a really good write up on modifiying the SMF for samba to autostart the required service here : http://wikis.sun.com/display/BigAdmin/Enabling+Browsing+with+Samba+in+Solaris+10+Update+4

import this file samba.xml

run these commands;

# svcadm disable samba
# svccfg import samba.xml
# svccfg delete svc:/network/samba:default
# svcadm refresh samba:smbd
# svcadm refresh samba:nmbd
# svcadm enable samba:smbd
# svcadm enable samba:nmbd

VirtualBox - crashing / freezing

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve had some problems since my upgrade to virtualbox 2.2.0 on OpenSolaris. After some time all of my linux boxes seem to just die. The virtual machine just stops responding. Strangely there was no problem with my windows vms after the update.

From what i can tell it looks like the upgrade turned off “IO APIC” - this is the bit that seemed to cause the problem. Re-enabling this on all of my linux boxes seems to have fixed the problem. I’ll continue testing for another week and update this post if any problems re-occur.

opensolaris - zfs PCI-e sata controller

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1200

Time for me to add some more sata ports to my opensolaris build. I’ve been using the SI 3114 PCI cards (4x sata) up until now without any issue, but they are limited by the bandwidth on the PCI slot. Time to upgrade and boost my performance.

At the moment i’m looking at grabbing one of these UIO cards;

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS-L8i.cfm

From what iv’e been reading these cards will work fine in a PCI-e slot (8x / 16x) after a bit of modding and display the drives straight to opensolaris without any additional drivers etc. (same chipset used in various sun servers)

OpenSolaris - Samba server

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1200

Time to share your newly created ZFS volume via samba to your windows clients. There is some CIFS / SMB support built into the kernel now, but i’ve grown used to the SMB server…

Fire up add software - click filesystems - enable filter for “smb”, there are three packages generally. I get all three, but you only need the kernel update and the server package. The other is the SMB client.

opensolaris - network teaming

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1200

Otherwise known as trunking or link aggregation. I believe it is the best way to get that additional boost out of your network server while providing a bit of redundancy on link failure. here is how to do it…

Official docs on the process here… http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-6990/gdysn?a=view and some good bits here http://blogs.sun.com/nickyv/entry/link_aggregation_jumpstart_post_install

dladm (data link admin) is the tool for the job. List the links you currently have…

dladm show-link

First shut down the links you are currently using.. (you will have to do this on the console)

opensolaris - smbd issues?

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

Hmm… i’ve been having problems since the 2009.06 (snv_111b) update with cifs.

Cant pin it exactly as it could be “load” related… hmmm.

found this ? http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=107681 this also may be a clue.. http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=92472&tstart=75

imapd ? might have to go back to 2008.11

You might get better performance if you enable oplocks but there are known issues with it but you can do it just to see if you see any difference:

svccfg -s smb/server setprop smbd/oplock_enable=boolean: true

OpenSolaris - Headless server

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve moved from a CentOS linux distro running vmware server 2.0 to OpenSolaris running VirtualBox. My previous system was totally headless and i wanted something similar to replace it.

I’ve just started getting into OpenSolaris for many reasons (Sun has some cool stuff - ZFS / VirtualBox). But I have always wanted to run OpenSolaris as a headless server, and from what i initially found VirtualBox didn’t have the easy to use autostart on boot features that vmware server had. But there are always ways to get things working…

Opensolaris : Citrix XenServer / ESX - Hooking into ZFS

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

To share your zfs pool via NFS (that works with Citrix Xen / ESX) to a host called “esxhost”;

zfs set sharenfs=rw,nosuid,root=esxhost tank/nfs

Note : You MUST have a resolvable name from the opensolaris box. i.e. you should be able to ping it. I have tried with ip’s only and it will fail. I have edited the /etc/hosts file to include the following line for my config;

opensolaris / zfs - whitebox build

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve built a little server for home use, but it pales in comparison to this beast… This type of setup would be perfect for a lab / test environment that requires lots of fast and reliable disk. SCSI drives are fading out, SATA can perform if its setup right. When you look at the price of the entire build you wonder why corporations continue to spend the big bucks on the big storage names.

zfs - playing with various configs

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

If you dont have the disks available to build up a zpool and have a play with zfs you can actually just use files created with the mkfile command… The commands are exactly the same.

mkfile 64m disk1

mkfile 64m disk2

mkfile 64m disk3

mkfile 10m disk4

mkfile 100m disk5

mkfile 100m disk6

Now you can create a zpool using the above files… (i’m using raidz for this setup)

zpool create test raidz /fullpath/disk1 /fullpath/disk2 /fullpath/disk3

opensolaris - jumbo frames

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

If your keen on enabling jumbo frames in opensolaris this is the way…

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-6990/gdyqk?l=en&a=view

# dladm show-phys

LINK MEDIA STATE SPEED DUPLEX DEVICE

net0 ether up 100Mb full bge0

itops1 ether up 100Mb full qfe3

web1 ether up 100Mb full bge1

# dladm show-linkprop -p mtu web1

LINK PROPERTY VALUE DEFAULT POSSIBLE

web1 mtu 1500 1500 –

# ifconfig web1 unplumb

# dladm set-linkprop -p mtu=9000 web1

# ifconfig web1 plumb 10.10.1.2/24 up

VirtualBox - Dup on ping

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve had this with certain kernels (2009.06) on opensolaris. Seems there is some incompatibility between some kernels and the opensolaris virtualbox network emulation. This only seems to effect linux virtual guests.

When you try to ping an address you get something like this…

[root@VA-DHCPWEB ~]# ping 192.168.9.15 PING 192.168.9.15 (192.168.9.15) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 192.168.9.15: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=1.85 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.9.15: icmp_seq=1 ttl=127 time=1.88 ms (DUP!)

Flashing si3114 to sata only bios

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 +1200

This is the perfect controller for adding additional sata drives into opensolaris (well in terms of price, the bandwidth of the PCI slot is the only negative part). The si3114 comes with the default bios that supports various raid configs, but this requires additional drivers to be loaded.

Essentially the “raid” on the card is called fakeraid as it does not actually process any data itself, but hooks into the cpu via a driver and lets your cpu do all the work.

Opensolaris 2008.11 and xvm

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve been dabbling with virtual box up until this point. But have decided to take it to the next step by using xvm to run my virtual machines. I have taken a guide from BDerzhavets at this site : http://bderzhavets.blogspot.com/2008/12/xvm-on-opensolaris-2008.html

First step is to open package manager and find the “vitalization” grouping. Install everything in this group. You’ll probably find some packages are already installed.

Next you’ll need to add the xvm kernel to the grub startup menu (menu.1st). This bit is a bit of blind faith from my perspective - its a shame that the xvm kernel package doesn’t add itself to grub? Anyhow… You need to add the following as another boot option in the /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst file;

Opensolaris : SMF and Squid

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 +1200

Decided to create a SMF manifest for squid so that it autostarts on boot.

Command to start squid : /usr/squid/sbin/squid

Command to stop squid : /usr/squid/sbin/squid -k shutdown

This site has a good starter on SMF creation : http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/mouting_windows_shares_at_startup

I’ve taken a copy of the /var/svc/manifest/network/smb/server.xml file for my squid manifest and placed it at /var/svc/manifest/network/squid/squid.xml

Import the XML using this command;

svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/network/squid/squid.xml

Update: i’ve stopped this work as i missed the fact that squid already comes with a SMF manifest! :) No idea how i missed that one. You can enable via ;

svcadm enable svc:/network/http:squid

This is the manifest for the above service;

Opensolaris - configuring squid as a transparent proxy

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I used to have a virtual machine that acted as a transparent proxy, but as of late thought i’d move squid onto my host box (opensolaris). This way hopefully increasing the amount of free ram available to the host while also taking advantage of ZFS etc…

So this is a very brief guide on how to configure your opensolaris 2008.11 box as a transparent proxy. Essentially meaning if you set the solaris box as the default gateway all web traffic will be cached as it goes through it before it goes onto your dls router or outside connection.

Opensolaris - Managing Boot Environments with beadm

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300

To get a list of all of your boot environments within Opensolaris use beadm like so….

beadm list

Assuming you know the name of the boot environment that is causing issues you can use the following command (using its name) to remove the ones you think are suss. Note: you need to boot up in the environment that you wish to keep first.

beadm destroy opensolaris-2

If you destroy an environment that is active on boot it will be changed to another be that is available. You can use the following command to set it to a specific boot environment;

Opensolaris - where has my memory gone?

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300

Use this command in 2008.11 to get details on where your memory is currently being used…

echo ::memstat | pfexec mdb -k

Page Summary Pages MB %Tot ———— —————- —————- —- Kernel 263992 1031 34% ZFS File Data 91917 359 12% Anon 376867 1472 48% Exec and libs 11484 44 1% Page cache 3387 13 0% Free (cachelist) 9766 38 1% Free (freelist) 24807 96 3%

Total 782220 3055 Physical 782219 3055

Opensolaris - Updating solaris with the development repository

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300

Want to keep your opensolaris on the “edge” of developments? Most of the experience i have had is that the “dev” repository contains mainly stable releases that are being held until the next official release (every 6 months).

This is how you do it…

Launch Package Manager - and choose “settings” then “manage repositories”

Add the dev repository URL and give it a name.

NOTE: The name cannot contain any spaces!

zfs - java management gui

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300

It hasn’t made it into opensolaris yet. But from what i’ve heard it should be making an appearance over from the solaris 10 OS soon. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like…

Should make managing zfs a bit easier - though its already quite easy. Perhaps if you have quite alot of zpools / zfs file systems it will look prettier. ;)

Troubleshooting - Time Slider (zfs snapshots)

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300

1. snapshot complains about no access to cron

This problem i came across was after i was playing with crontab. It looks like the zfs snapshot service uses an account called “zfssnap” and if it doesnt have access to cron then it will have issues creating / checking snapshots. Check the file /etc/cron.d/cron.allow and ensure that “zfssnap” is in there. The issues i had looked like this in the log… (check the logs via the log file viewer)

zfs - checking your zpool throughput

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

This is quite a good diagnostic for checking your disk throughput. Try copying data to and from your zpool while your running this command on the host…

zpool iostat -v unprotected 2

capacity     operations    bandwidth
pool         used  avail   read  write   read  write
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
unprotected  1.39T   668G     18      7  1.35M   161K
c7d0       696G   403M      1      2  55.1K  21.3K
c9d0       584G   112G      8      2   631K  69.3K
c7d1       141G   555G      8      2   697K  70.0K
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----

The above command will keep displaying the above output every 2 seconds (average during that time). I’ve used it a few times to ensure that all disks are being used (in write operations) where needed. Of course read op’s may not be typically across all disks as it will depend where the data is…

OpenSolaris cifs/smb server - configuring ACL’s on shares - Part 2

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

I have done most of the explaining in another post on how the permissions work with a zfs cifs share - link here.

In this post I’m going to show an example of how to add multiple groups / users to a specific folder. Which then recursively adds its ACL’’s to any child objects. Its essentially like the other commands i used, but with an extra line per user or group you want to configure;

OpenSolaris cifs/smb server - configuring ACL's on shares

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

O.k. from this point I’m assuming you have created your zfs shares via the zfs command and renamed appropriately like so….. (if you havent setup cifs yet then check read this)

zfs set sharesmb=on protected/backup

zfs set sharesmb=name=backup protected/backup

Now to check your current shares type…

sharemgr show

zfs

zfs/protected/backup backup=/protected/backup

zfs/protected/photos photos=/protected/photos

Now its time to look at NFSv4 ACL’s. This page has a great explanation of ACL’s and how to set things up. http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=939

OpenSolaris - Migrating from samba to cifs

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

OpenSolaris 2008.11 has a cifs/smb server built into the kernel. From what i have been reading (and discovering) this is a much more efficient and faster way to get your files out into the network.

Previously i have run a dedicated samba service to share my files as I’ve come from various linux distros which require it. Seems i should be doing things differently on OpenSolaris.

The dedicated samba service is called;

OpenSolaris - RTL8111/8168B issues

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

I’ve got an integrated RTL8111 nic which seemed to work fine under opensolaris 2008.11. But if the nic was put under load for a various length of time it seemed to just drop off the network.

At first i thought it was my SMB service dying, but after a quick ping i relised i had lost the entire TCP/IP stack on that particular card. Hmm…

It does come back online if you are patient and wait for about 5mins or so.

OpenSolaris - Manual Network DNS issue

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

If you have tried to setup a manual IP on your opensolaris box you may find that DNS is not working as you would expect in some cases. nslookup resolves the name to an ip, but pinging doesnt make it to the box…

How to fix;

Edit your /etc/nsswitch.conf file and add the word “dns” to the hosts and ipnodes lines If you make a backup of /etc/nsswitch.conf you can also just copy /etc/nsswitch.dns over it…

ZFS - Creating snapshots

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

There is some funky ways of modifying the default “time slider” services to do the work for you, but i like a bit more hands on. Generally so i know what is happening in the background, but the time slider can be sometimes overkill creating snapshots every 15 mins if not configured properly.

On a side note i’ve yet to get my head around the SMF stuff properly… Anyhow onto creating snapshots.

ZFS - Removing all snapshots

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

To list all of your current snapshots;

zfs list -t snapshot

This is a handy script to remove all snapshots….

for snapshot in `zfs list -H -t snapshot | cut -f 1` do zfs destroy $snapshot done

As always : at your own risk. ;)

Linux - crontab

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

Time to schedule some tasks!

First you need to make sure your in the /etc/cron.d/cron.allow file. If you are not SU to root and add yourself into it.

Now to create your new crontab file;

crontab -e

You are in vi in your newly created crontab file (note if you do not have access to do this it will say so)

Now, i’m no expert at using vi, but if you press i you will go into insert mode. Do this, then type the cron job details. A typical cron job will look like this

ZFS - Error 16 : Inconsistent filesystem structure

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300

Oh no. I’ve managed to get this error before. And it was right after i applied compression to the rpool zfs filesystem. Upon the next reboot i was greeted with this error message;

Error 16 : Inconsistent filesystem structure

For me it was a show stopper and i had to go into recovery. So i’ve learnt my lesson - Not to touch the rpool zpool.

I was lucky enough to have put my data within a zfs filesystem (rpool/virtual) i created within the default rpool zpool. I use this spot for my VirtualBox virtual machines.

ZFS basics

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +1300

I’ve had a play with WHS but eventually got annoyed with its lack of performance. Yes i know its not built for performance and typically is used just as a backup / simple store with duplication as redundancy, just i couldn’t stand the speed of the thing. If you were ever unlucky enough (even post power pack 1) to do a copy during the “data moving” the performance was even worse. On a positive note nothing beats it if you have a heap of non-similar sized disks that you want to put together (with redundancy) as a single shared storage pool.

ZFS compression types

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +1300

ZFS compression as of OpenSolaris 2008.11 has a few types to choose from.

lzjb (default) | gzip | gzip-[1-9]

They are used via the zfs set compression=gzip poolname command.

The following test was quickly done out of personal interest - and is in no way scientific!

I have a AMD cpu with 3 cores (2.4Ghz). The data i copied to each of the shares consisted of video / documents / pictures and music. The first test i have done is based on compression only (i have not measured throughput)

OpenSolaris - Autologon

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +1300

There are two ways to setup the auto login for OpenSolaris (2008.11);

One - You can fire up the GUI using gdmsetup. Update : this didnt actually work when i tried it recentely - it might not be in this release of opensolaris.

Two - go to /etc/x****11/gdm/custom.conf (in newer releases its just /etc/gdm/custom.conf) and manually modify the required fields in the [daemon] section and add the following;

[daemon] AutomaticLoginEnable=true AutomaticLogin=username

OpenSolaris - SMF and VirtualBox

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +1300

So… i’m looking for a way to fire up some VirtualBox machines after a reboot on OpenSolaris. SMF is the key. Just need to create some XML docs that fire up a couple of headless vm’s.

Shouldn’t be too hard. Lets see what i can come up with.

Here is a good pdf about migrating Legacy RC services into SMF, which has given me a few pointers….

how to shutdown a vm;