snv128

OpenSolaris is dead - what's next?

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:41:37 +0200

After Oracle has expressed its intention to discontinue OpenSolaris now its time for OpenSolaris users to think about what to do. I haven’t made my mind yet where I will move my Homeserver to. Right now I’m consindering these choices:

Solaris 11
FreeBSD 8.1
Nexenta Core Platform 3.0

Of course you can wait for Solaris 11 to appear, but this release will not be free for my use (non-commercial). So I am not really considering it as the license is to expensive for my use case. So the race is really between FreeBSD and NCP - and I haven’t made up my mind which is better. I will evaluate both on this set of criteria:

ZFS and DTrace functionality
Stability
Security mechanisms
Broad x86 hardware support
Broad set of open source tools as part of the distribution
Availability of Netatalk, NFS, CIFS
SMF-like service management
Xen Dom0 support

Any guidance is highly appreciated.

ZFS-Filer based on Dell PowerEdge R510

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:22:50 +0200

Today I was working with a customer who wants to built a Solaris 10 / ZFS server node with a lot of internal disks for file serving purposes.

I suggested a Dell PowerEdge R510 with a PERC H700 Controller and 12 internal 2 TB SATA HDDs (3.5”). Each HDD will be setup as RAID0 set on the PERC H700 RAID Controller and handed out to ZFS to built a RAID-Z2 on top of it. In addition the R510 will incorporate two internal 2.5” drives to make up for a mirrored operating system (rpool).

The PERC H700 is 6GB SAS RAID-Controller with two internal ports (4 lanes each) to drive the disks within the R510. It’s brother is the H800 with two external ports (not used here). The R510 is two socket (Intel Xeon 5600 Series), 2U server with up to 128 GB of memory, 14 internals disks (12x 3.5” Hotplug, 2x 2.5” Internal) and 3 PCIe-Slots.

The fileserver will have 16 GB of memory and one Intel Xeon X5660 CPU (2.66 GHz, 6 Cores). An option is to raise memory to 48 GB which would be required if you want to deduplicate the entire disk capacity and keep the block tables in memory (required for performance).

Summary: the Dell PowerEdge R510 is a perfect server for anyone that wants to built a ZFS-based Server. While it is not listed yet on the Oracle/Sun Solaris HCL it is working with Solaris (there are drivers for all integrated components).

Today I bought a Bialetti Cappuccinatore to make better milk...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:48:50 +0200

Today I bought a Bialetti Cappuccinatore to make better milk froth for my coffee. Yum!

Installing Teradata Express on VirtualBox

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 20:32:00 +0200

Teradata makes its latest version of its Analytical DBMS available for developers to try out in their own sandbox (“Teradata Express”). This catched my interested as I wanted to learn more about Teradata. Teradata Express 13 is available for Windows, for VMware and as SaaS hosted on Amazon EC2.

I tried out the Amazon EC2 hosted version first, but I dislike the fact that it looses all its configuration and data when you shutdown the VM. So you have to reload all your settings and data after a reboot. Keeping it running all the time is also no option for me (you pay 0.30 US$ per hour).

I don’t run Windows on any of my private computers (only Mac OS X and OpenSolaris). So the Windows version wasn’t an option either. So I decided to use the VMware version.

Unfortunately there isn’t a free VMware Player available for Mac OS or Solaris. So I decided to download a trial version of VMware Fusion for Mac OS to give it a try. The good news is that it is working perfectly with VMware Fusion on my MacBook. The bad news is that VMware Fusion has a price tag of about 40 US$ and it would have been the third virtualisation product on this computer besides Parallels and VirtualBox.

So I started figuring out how to use Teradata Express with VirtualBox:

1. Start TDE VM in VMware and remove the VMware tools (execute vmware-uninstall-tools.pl as root)

2. Shutdown the TDE VM in VMware

3. Copy or move the five VMDK-Diskimage files from the folder containing the VMware VM to a new location where you want them to stay permanently

4. Create a new VirtualBox like this (you can use the VirtualBox UI as well):

VBoxManage createvm —name TDE13 —ostype Linux26_64 —register

VBoxManage modifyvm TDE13 —memory 768 —acpi on —ioapic on —pae on —hwvirtex on —hwvirtexexcl off —nestedpaging on —vtxvpid on —boot1 disk —nic1 bridged —bridgeadapter “en1: AirPort” —audio none —vrdp on —usb off

VBoxManage storagectl TDE13 —name SCSI1 —add scsi —controller LsiLogic

VBoxManage storageattach TDE13 —storagectl SCSI1 —port 0 —device 0 —type hdd —medium /Users/martin/VM/TDE13/Disk\ sda.vmdk

VBoxManage storageattach TDE13 —storagectl SCSI1 —port 1 —device 0 —type hdd —medium /Users/martin/VM/TDE13/Disk\ sdb.vmdk

VBoxManage storageattach TDE13 —storagectl SCSI1 —port 2 —device 0 —type hdd —medium /Users/martin/VM/TDE13/Disk\ sdc.vmdk

VBoxManage storageattach TDE13 —storagectl SCSI1 —port 3 —device 0 —type hdd —medium /Users/martin/VM/TDE13/Disk\ sdd.vmdk

VBoxManage storageattach TDE13 —storagectl SCSI1 —port 4 —device 0 —type hdd —medium /Users/martin/VM/TDE13/Teradata\ PDisk.vmdk

VBoxManage storagectl TDE13 —name IDE —add ide —controller PIIX4

VBoxManage storageattach TDE13 —storagectl IDE —port 0 —device 0 —type dvddrive —medium emptydrive

5. Start the new virtual machine

6. Install VirtualBox tools in VM

7. Optional: assign a fixed IP address (via yast) and enter it into /etc/hosts (Hostname dbccop1)

8. /etc/init.d/tpa start

That’s it. You can now use bteq or other tools to connect to Teradata.

Using VirtualBox Teradata is now running on my OpenSolaris server at home and on my MacBook.

Filesharing with my MacBooks, Timemachine & Performance

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 14:07:52 +0200

I installed netatalk (AppleTalk protocol for UNIX) on the server. Now I can share my files with the two MacBooks in the house easily and I have a perfect location for Timemachine backups. It running without any problems for some month now and I’m very happy.

This guide from Christopher Warner helped me getting it up and running.

Timemachine already saved my life when I accidentally deleted 250 photos when I only wanted to delete one. The files were restored very quickly from my Timemachine backup.

The performance of Appletalk over Gigabit Ethernet is great. I’m reading large files at 75 MByte/s and writing at about 50 MByte/s over the network. This is awesome compared to the small NAS box with FastEthernet that I was running before. The previous box peaked at about 7 MByte/s (using CIFS). So netatalk, ZFS and Solaris are great team!

Quick Update: Home Server - Power consumption

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 13:41:00 +0200

I put a simple powermeter on my homeserver. It is consuming about 60 to 65 Watts. Not bad, if you consider the power and capacity. But I would love too reduce it even more - perhaps with the next Intel Atom generation (if it will get ECC support).

Building an OpenSolaris Homeserver

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:46:00 +0100

After some thinking around christmas about how to protect my digital assets (mainly Photos and Music, some Movies and some Documents) I decided to build a Homeserver based on OpenSolaris.

Why do I want a server at home?

For the last two years I have kept my personal data on NAS device built by Fujitsu-Siemens which is sitting in my basement. The problem with this is not that I’m running out of capacity. The problem is that I’m not desperate enough anymore to keep my data on a device with a single drive. What if the drive fails? What if I accidentally delete some files? In addition, I never got the TimeMachine functionallity of my two MacBooks to work with this device in a reliable way.
So I was looking for a solution which protects me from failing disk drives, has an integrated and automated backup & recovery functionality and works with TimeMachine on Mac OS X.

Why OpenSolaris?

OpenSolaris has a very decent filesystem built into it which is called ZFS. ZFS makes it very easy to manage and protect your data because it has integrated RAID functionality, integrated Backup capability (Snapshots) and is very easy to setup. In addition OpenSolaris is very mature and, hey, it’s UNIX - which is at least a plus for me. I have worked with Solaris for a decade now and feel very comfortable with relying on it for my private data.

The ingredients

At first I was thinking about building a tiny Atom-based NAS system with a small case. I was about to buy an Intel D510MO board with a Dual Core Atom CPU. But I decided against it because of three reasons:

Lack of CPU power - I wanted to use some advanced ZFS features like RAID-Z, Deduplication and Compression. And I want to run a UPnP-Mediaserver which can recode media on-the-fly quickly. And I wanted a future proof solution which can give me enough “Oomph” for anything that comes to my mind in two or three years.
Lack of Expandability - the D510MO has only two SATA ports and one PCI slot. I would max it out immediately and have no room for future expansion.
Lack of ECC Support - ZFS uses the main memory for caching data before it writes them to disk. The last thing I want is silent data corruption to occur when a bit flips in memory

So I decided to built my homeserver around an AMD Athlon II X2 Energy Efficient CPU with 45W TDP. After doing some research I came up with the following bill of material:

AMD Athlon II X2 235e (2 Cores, 2.7 GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache, 45W TDP)
Asus M4A785TD-V EVO Mainboard (ECC-Support, 5x SATA + 1x eSATA, 6x PCI/PCIe, Onboard GFX)
2 GB of DDR3-1066 ECC Memory
2 Samsung HD154UI SATA-Drives (1.5 TB, 5400 RPM)
Energy Efficient Power Supply (80%+ Efficiency, 300 W)
Big Tower (5x 3,5”, 5x 5.25”)

The cost for everything was about 500 €. Later on I bought an additionally Intel Gigabit NIC for 25 €. I am thinking about to buy the Athlon II X4 605e CPU (Quadcore, 4x 2.3 GHz, 45W TDP) when the price gets low enough (perhaps just before the next generation of CPUs arrives).

You can see some photos of the components of the above mentioned ingredients here.

The setup

The parts have been built together very quickly. But unfortunately I wasn’t able to boot it - the power LED on the mainboard was on and the fans and disks spun up. But no video signal at all. Not even a beep from the builtin speaker. After one hour of research I was willing to send the motherboard and CPU back. Then my eye catched an additional 4-pin plug next to the CPU socket. Looking at the manual I realized that this was the powerplug for the CPU. Well, when I built my last PC myself about 10 years the CPU was provided with power of the main connector on the board.

Plugged it in and - voilà - the machine came up. I just flashed the newest BIOS version, enabled ECC-Support and switched the SATA ports to AHCI. Then I started the installation of OpenSolaris (snv130) from a USB stick that I had created before. It worked like a charm and after 15 minutes the machine was up and running.