parolski.com

Ok, so Linux doesn’t have ZFS yet, but it might not be that far off. There are signs of a readonly implementation, depending on whether or not people actually understand the license, being considered by linux kernel hackers. This would be a huge boost for linux, and Solaris alike. As Darren Moffat points out, ZFS already exists in the FreeBSD source tree, and its likely to be in Mac OSX . Given this, surely its only a matter of time before we see it put in. Already we’ve seen Linus have talks with Jeff Bonwick, which is definitely a good sign.

Maybe once this is done, a proper attempt at getting dtrace across might happen. After all, something like dtrace is highly desirable on any operating system.

A year ago Sun announced that it was going to be open sourcing its high availability cluster software. According to this blog, they are now delivering on that promise six months ahead of schedule by releasing two million lines of code. TWO MILLION!!!! thats loads! OHAC isn’t quite the same as Solaris Cluster. Its basically most of the code base, but not all packaged up and is not currently supported by Sun. However, Sun is intending on moving the development work away from the official product and onto the OHAC in the future. This is great news for anyone thinking of developing there own custom agents for their own software, or for anyone who just wants to poke around some enterprise-class cluster software!

The latest version of Opensolaris can be found at opensolaris.com . This was known as project indiana whilst in development and is now yours absolutely free! (support does cost). Its basically Sun’s home rolled distro of opensolaris.org , and now contains IPS (Image Packaging System) . Essentially IPS is like apt for ubuntu and debian:

you want netbeans?

pkg install netbeans

Theres also a graphical installer too! Theres a screencast you might want to watch which explains a little about how to use it, and what its about!

You should also note that its made it onto distrowatch.com, to rank 69!!!!Hopefully enough people will blog about the release to push that figure up!!!Surely it should make it to the top ten, for all the features it has?

Turning Solaris to goo with destructive commands is something I’ve been enjoying for a while now, so its great to see someone add cash to the equation and take the next step in “squashing” bugs.. and hard drives.

Having ZFS and SAMBA on the home machine is great. It was simple to set up a share and offer it out to my house mates for them to backup their dissertation work on. With ZFS compressing the files, some of my file systems are getting a 1.6x ratio (60% disk space for free compared with a non-compressing file system)

The interesting bit comes with file permissions and Windows file attributes which aren’t quite the same, in fact, not at all. The attributes get mapped onto the unix file permissions in an interesting way, and you’ll need to keep that in mind when ls -l ing around a shared directory.

Meanwhile, there was a directory named “—-FILES—-” on the share. Trying to use

cd "----FILES----"

doesn’t quite work! Despite quoting the directory name, cd still tries to take some of those dashes as a switch. I’m not sure if theres a way around this using the relative path, but there is a different workaround: simply use the absolute path, instead of a relative one to get you there, eg:

cd /mydir/----FILES..../

To make a directory with leading dashes, you’ll need to specify the full pathname, or use something like this to make the process less painful:

mkdir `pwd`/--mydir--

My final year dissertation project is a software tool for asset tracking in a data center environment. The basic idea is that you run this tool after install your Solaris machine, and it reports back information about the hardware to a database for later inspection. Its also has hooks for being run as a service, so you can probe the machine at any time to see what its got. Simple enough, right?

Well, Sun has just announced that their Service Tag technology has just been open sourced. They fit in as a part to their Sun Connection infrastructure management platform. Basically, the service tags are the little bits of software used to identify you hardware and report it back to you. This can be implemented for hardware and software, and should mean that ISVs and all hardware vendors can make their products that little bit easier to manage! To quote the site:

Open Service Tag is the reference implementation of a standards initiative that will seek the involvement of OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and ISVs (Independent Software Vendor) to define a standard definition for product identification and discovery.

This is very good news for System Administrators! I can speak from experience that its not nice having to open up hundreds of machines looking for a particular piece of hardware, because there isn’t a command to find it. I truly hope that Sun go through all their back catalog of hardware to make sure absolutely everything is possible to find! This should also include bits of hardware that carry other interesting things built in, like motherboard network interfaces.

Its also quite entertaining that if a Sun product isn’t called a “Sun Java Web enabled, scalable ..” something or other, it still has important sounding features like “Sun Update Satellite Console”.

Its also surprising that Sun has been working on this since May 2007 and I’ve missed it till now! A high level overview of how this might help you manage your enterprise can be found here.

In my last post, the files were being written to an IDE hard disks. Now lets see what happens if we write to /tmp instead. Will Solaris cope with ten million files in /tmp? First, if we want to make use of the compression, we need to make a file system:

We make the files (we can use files instead of real disks…):

anton@solaris-devx ~ $ mkfile 100M /tmp/file1
anton@solaris-devx ~ $ mkfile 100M /tmp/file2
and then su to root to make the ZFS file system (mirrored):

# zpool create crazedPool mirror /tmp/file1 /tmp/file2

I should note that for some reason ZFS didn’t make use of the entire file size:

# zfs list crazedPool
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
crazedPool 110K 63.4M 20K /crazedPool

And now the real test. How about a big file? Lets say, 100G?:

anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ time mkfile 100G woot
real 1m21.995s
user 0m0.191s
sys 0m30.308s
And what about 10000 files, each 10M in size?:
anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ i="0"
anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ time while [ $i -lt 10000 ]
> do
> mkfile 10M la0$i
> i=$[$i+1]
> done
real 1m46.789s
user 0m4.665s
sys 0m43.492s

So far, so good. So now lets push the envelope off the desk. Or maybe off a cliff. Lets see what happens when we make a 100TB file with ZFS!

anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ ls -l megaFile
-rw------- 1 anton staff 107374182400000 Mar 15 18:05 megaFile

and the compression ratio?:

anton@solaris-devx tmp $ zfs get compressratio crazedPool
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
crazedPool compressratio 1.00x -

hmm, not quite what I was expecting!

So last time we pulled out an IDE hard disk, and Solaris lived. It got me thinking…What else can we do to a hard disk that Solaris might not like? What about making a really big file? What about a 9TB file on an 80GB hard disk?:

anton@solaris-devx ~ $ time mkfile 9000G deleteThis

real 120m42.953s
user 0m16.448s
sys 46m55.092s

anton@solaris-devx ~ $ ls -l deleteThis
-rw------- 1 anton staff 9663676416000 Mar 9 02:22 deleteThis

And the machine didn’t die! But what about the compression ratio?

anton@solaris-devx ~ $ zfs get compressratio tank/home
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
tank/home compressratio 1.22x

Looks like the ratio is an average for all the files on that file system. So lets try to artificially inflate this value. We can run a little script like this:

#/bin/sh
#A little script to make ten million files each 1 megabyte in size
i="0"
while [ $i -lt 10000000 ]
do
mkfile 10M la$i
i=$[$i+1]
done

The result (after about an hour of making files) wasn’t good:

bash: fork: Not enough space

This looks more like an issue bash had rather than ZFS. So did we push up that compression ratio?:

anton@solaris-devx mess $ zfs get compressratio tank/home
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
tank/home compressratio 1.22x -

Seemingly not. To compensate, we’ll do something more crazy for PART2

Sun has released a new blade module for their Sun Blade 8000 system, the x8450 . With 128GB of RAM in a single module and sixteen hardware threads per module, that means you get 160 threads and 1280GB of RAM in 19 rack units. Pworrrr! If these modules were used in the Sun Blade 8000p, that would give the same performance in just 14 rack units! So in a 42U rack, you can get three of these units in, totaling: 3840GB of RAM, 480 Hardware threads!!!Fantastic! Just make sure you warn your electric supplier!

So you’ve just installed Solaris because of the well-deserved praise regarding ZFS, SMF, predictive self healing, Zones and Dtrace. And then you said, “It runs vmware, right?”. Well, to my knowledge, no. Not quite. It does run xVM (a breed of “bare metal” type 1 hypervisor, which is very similar to xen.

But more interestingly, it also runs VirtualBox, a type 2 hypervisor which works pretty much like vmware server. This really is a great step to bringing virtualisation to the desktop for Solaris users

All you need to do is download the package, extract and and install it. From there on in, you can use the GUI to create a GuestOS and be running those apps you need! Crucially, it supports the following as Guest OS:

• Windows XP
• Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 works a treat)
• Solaris!
• …and many other OS, a list can he found here

A little tip to install XP in less than 10 mins:

Make a copy of the disc image as a .ISO file. Then copy that disc image to

/tmp

Be prepared for a hit on the RAM, as thats where /tmp is mounted! Then, before you start the Guest OS for the first time, configure it to mount the disc image from /tmp

Using your main memory as the install medium only leaves the processor and disc writes as your bottlenecks, making installs go really quick!!!

Of course, once your Guest OS is installed, be sure to delete the disc image you copied into /tmp

Happy hypervising! (its probably not a real word, but its great for telling people who aren’t into computing….”yeah, I’ve been hypervising for a few days now now….”.

your friend “…..hmmm, is that bad for your health?”