OpenSolaris + Open Storage + ZFS = Open Source storage. Not that you can’t just pay Sun for an appliance if that’s what you’re after. They have the OpenStorage 7000, but really isn’t it fun to build up your own? If that’s what you’re after Sun has the Open Storage Community page. Using Open Storage you can go far beyond using Time Machine with an Open Solaris NAS. You can build your own truly enterprise class storage system and connect to it from pretty much any operating system. However, it’s not an appliance. Support isn’t necessarily going to be end=to-end if you BTO your own gear, rolling your own SAN.…
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SCALE Speakers Revealed
The Southern California Linux Expo has released the list of speakers for the seventh annual conference being held at the LAX Westin on February 20th through 22nd. Regrettably I will not be one of the speakers this year as I’ll be far away from Los Angeles, but the crop of talent they came up with this year is one of the best yet. Check it out here.
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Mono 2.0
Mono 2.0 allows .Net developers to use Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X. Mono comes with MeMA, a tool that allows for automated .Net to Linux migrations away from .Net. A lot is being made these days about Silverlight. Look at what our friends from NetFlix have done for Mac users with it. Well, the Mono framework was leveraged to write a Mono-based plugin compatible with Silverlight that they are calling Moonlight. This is pretty cool because it allows Silverlight developers to convert their code into Moonlight and then publish it as an actual desktop application rather than a more web-oriented widget. The open source community has provided a really…
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Xsan: Setting up StorNext Clients on Red Hat Enterprise
Xsan and the acfs (Apple Clustered File System) volumes that Xsan controls can be utilized by Windows and Linux clients. The Windows setup is fairly straight forward, so here we’re going to cover setting up a Linux client to mount an Xsan volume using StorNext. First, buy StorNext. Second, register StorNext. Then, go to your Metadata Controller and Backup Metadata Controller and use the cvfsid command. Copy the contents and go to this site, completing the form using the output from cvfsid: http://Prodreg.quantum.treehousei.com/login.aspx Now put the information that Quantum sends you into the /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/config/license.dat file on your Metadata Controllers and reboot them. Now you’re ready to setup your clients.…
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RANCID
Here’s a good overview of Rancid from the recent UUASC meeting.
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Mac OS X: Easy Find
Using the find command is a little weird to people who are used to using locate. However, it is far more powerful and doesn’t come with the indexing requirements that locate does. So, if you’ve been using locate try and get familiar with using something like this instead (looking for slapd.conf – you can change that as needed): find / -name “slapd.conf” -print
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SCALE CFP
The Southern California Linux Expo Call For Papers is open for SCALE 2009: http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/s7x_cfp
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Making the case for Solaris
I recently read an article that Solaris is a dead OS (or will be rather shortly). I beg to differ, proveded the hardware support is there. Solaris can still multithread better than anyone. Solaris’ ZFS is still the most superior file system available (although before the ReiserFS founder got put in prison for wasting his wife it looked poised for greatness) and the Sun hardware is still best of breed. Sun as a company is also going to be building tighter integration into MySQL, which should help boost numbers. But the pony-tail-laden chief of Sun definitely has his work cut out for him. There are certain acquisitions that have…
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LISA 2008
No, this isn’t the new version of my wife (although there is a new version out and it’s awesome;). Instead, LISA’08 is the 22nd year of the Large Installation System Administration conference in San Diego California. LISA runs from November 9 to November 14th of 2008 and looks to be a conference those who do mass deployment might not want to miss. The biggee this year is virtualization: ESX, ESX 3i, Xen, etc. But there are alos talks on security, forensics, the Linux Kernel, Performance tools for Solaris and Linux, Perl mods, network performance tuning, wireshark, diskless Linux, SELinux, mass deployment of database servers, disk-to-disk backups for Unix, cfengine, directory…
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Viral Marketing
Is it possible that a client can build a Facebook app, deploy it and not tell anyone, yet get so much traffic on the app that we have to add a second server within 6 hours? Yes. Is it then possible to quickly prop up an Apache cluster, forklift the data in there, throw together a quick MySQL cluster and be off to the races within 4 more hours while the end users of the app are complaining? Yes. Why, because there’s money in it. And where there’s money there’s will. And where there’s will there’s a way!