Solaris-Express

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…

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; 

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 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;

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.

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…

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.

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. ;)

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

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.

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 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)

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

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;