Sun

ZFS in the Trenches presentation at LISA 09

published on Tue, 12/29/2009 - 12:05

Just got the chance to finally sit down and watch Ben Rockwood's presentation at LISA 09: ZFS in the Trenches. If you are even thinking about ZFS and how it works, it's a very informative presentation. There is very little marketing-speak, and he very specifically targets sysadmins as his audience. Great stuff!

New in Solaris 10 Update 8 - ZFS Support in Flash Archives

published on Wed, 10/14/2009 - 12:08

The release of Solaris 10 10/09 (Update 8) has come and gone, and without too much fanfare from my point of view.  In my opinion, there is one new feature that will really help propel root ZFS installations into the enterprises where there was resistance before.  You see, many larger corporations have invested a lot of time and money into using Flash Archive coupled with Jumpstart to be able to

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Three - The Scripts

published on Wed, 09/23/2009 - 12:24

In part three of the series, we ended with a working Custom Jumpstart setup, but you most certainly will be left wanting to do more.  That's where the begin and finish scripts come into play -- anything you can do via /bin/sh you can do via Jumpstart. Up until now, the series has been more of a "Typical Jumpstart" tutorial -- this post is where this series of posts earns it's name. Read more for about 200 lines of shell-scripting goodness.

 

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Three - The Jumpstart Profile

published on Tue, 09/22/2009 - 11:16

In part two of the series, we left off with a non-working Custom Jumpstart setup.  By creating our Jumpstart profile file and a sysidcfg file, we'll have a basic, but working Custom Jumpstart.  The profile contains settings specific to the installation, where the sysidcfg file contains settings specific to the machine during and after installation.

 

 

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Two

published on Mon, 09/21/2009 - 10:30

In part one of the series, we setup the ISC DHCP server. Now it's time to set up our install and config servers -- both of which will reside on the same box in this case.  Solaris Jumpstart uses standard protocols, namely TFTP and NFS to provide these services.  In this post, we'll just be setting up the framework for the real customizations that will come in parts three and four.

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part One

published on Fri, 09/18/2009 - 16:48

Only in my world do you get a RHCE one week, and then come back and work on nothing but Solaris Jumpstart for the next couple of weeks! Oh well, it's always good as long as you're learning. What started out as a simple upgrade from Apache 2.0 to 2.2 quickly turned into re-provisioning our web tier. We could have upgraded, but there ended up being so many dependencies needed I decided that it would be easier to just start fresh with Solaris 10u7 on all our webservers. Since I knew that I'd be doing this to all our webservers, it made sense to spend the time up-front on setup up a completely automated installation. This time spent on the front-end should save a huge amount of time on the back side when it comes to troubleshooting. In my case, I learned a lot of undocumented tips and tricks, and stumbled across a few "gotchas" as well. After going through an exercise like this, I now know what Puppet is for, and ordered my first book. I'll give a review once I'm done.

First of all, we already have an ISC DHCPd server running to provide Red Hat Kickstart installs, so I decided to leverage that. Sun's DHCPd works fine, but it's a completely different beast when it comes to configuration.

Part one of the series covers setting up your dhcpd.conf.

SCSA vs RHCE

published on Wed, 08/26/2009 - 22:48

After taking and passing both my SCSA and my RHCE exams this year, it's time to reflect.  Read on for the pros and cons of each from a student's point of view.

Using fssnap and ufsdump to create point-in-time backups of mounted UFS partitions in Solaris 10

published on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 13:56

With all the (deserved) hype about ZFS, there's still a lot of systems that make use of UFS out there.  With all the things that ZFS can do, there's still some things that it can't do (incompatability with flash archives, and POSIX ACL's are examples).  I needed to basically make an image of a T1000 that had some non-global zones installed, stick it into a lab for a couple weeks, and then return it to it's previous state.  Since this server had non-global zones, using flar's was questionable. So I decided to use fssnap and ufsdump to make my backups.

Back to Linux for my Desktop

published on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 19:05

Well, it's been just over a month since I've converted my main workstation over to OpenSolaris. Unfortunately, I'm going to abandon the project, and switch back to Linux as my choice as primary desktop OS.

Migrating a Zone to a Different Machine on Solaris 10

published on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 14:37

Zones are one of the best features in Solaris 10 -- they're so lightweight that you can use them at almost no cost in performance. Today, I ran across a situation where one of my zones needed more RAM, and the box it was on didn't have it. Read on for how to migrate a Solaris Zone to a different machine, and an important update to Solaris 10/08 that makes the process so much easier.

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