You need to read this: An Open Letter to the OpenDS Community and to Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice has been ripped apart, now OpenDS, who knows what else is happening in other open source projects that Sun’s involved in.

This kills me. I love Sun Microsystems and I’m just sitting here watching it rip itself apart piece by piece. Who is in control? Why has Sun continued to RIF many of its most valuable employees without having a clue. Someone posted in the comments the old and sad phrase: “Too Many Chiefs, Not Enough Indians.” Its true, everyone knows it, every has known it for years and years and you don’t have to be an employee to see and feel it effecting end customers.

Here is another old and tired phrase thats sadly applicable: STOP THE INSANITY!!!!!!!!

I an perhaps the most involved and long running member of the OpenSolaris project. I love Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Sun Microsystems…. but all of us involved must tread very carefully with wisdom, clarity, and a good measure of faith and hope.

We’re at a cross roads, a conflict that has been lingering and postponed for some time now that Indiana is bringing to the surface with new viger. So lets get some basic ground rules understood please…

“Sun” refers to the corporate, nameless entity. The big black box when no attribution is available. I keep hearing “Sun did this..”, “Sun did that..”. This has got to stop. We know the players involved. They, despite having a Sun badge, are members of the community. Address them as such.

The OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) is a representative body created as an interface between Sun corporate and the community. It consists of 7 natural persons who are a core sample of the community at large. I keep hearing calls for community votes; this is rediculous. The vote of the OGB is the vote of the community. If you don’t like the decisions of the OGB then you should pay more attention when voting for your elected representatives.

What we’re seeing now is that there is no leadership. Those that would be leaders, such as Ian, aren’t getting the respect of a leader. No one is arbitrating and no one believes in the system. We’re seeing calls to revoke the commit rights of individuals who implement something that a community members doesn’t like, and people arguing with motions from the community submitted to the board. This is chaos of the worst kind and a sign that people don’t trust the system or even know that one exists.

Part of this confusion is the fact that the players inside of Sun who might ordinarily represent Sun corporate are also acting as members of the community.. thus the OGB isn’t a definitive bridge between the two groups.

The OGB itself has been paralyzed by several factors including internal gridlock (members that don’t want to work with others on the board), a lack of leadership from the chair and vice chair, an apparent disregard for the Constitution or rules of order, and an inability to act above other members of the community as leaders. Power and authority are available to those who assume it, not those who wait for it to be granted… because that was already done.

Lets face it, we got by for a long time because Jim was acting as the leader of this community.. but as he’s pulled back from that role when he moved to Japan no one has really filled that void. Dr. Stephen Hahn has done so perhaps more than anyone else, but he’s a very busy man.

The community is without leadership and clearly it is required. I would ask that someone immediately be appointed to such a position as Jim once filled and to get all parties involved on track. This chaos must end and its going to be a full time job to do it.

The Opera web browser has been around a long time and its always been a bit player with a hardcore following. I’ve always thought of it as the BeOS of browsers. But are you using it?

To be perfect honest I think that Opera is (now) probly the best browser available. Even more so, its integrated mail client is I think the best mail client available. If Opera had any one fault it would be that it does too much, because at its heart its really more of a windowing system than it is a browser.

Beyond just being a great browser, Opera is available for just about every platform under the sun, and they have always been a very good friend of Solaris. Opera really deserves a lot of credit and praise for its efforts in this area; a dedication that I wish large vendors like Oracle would latch on to (Oracle 11g still isn’t available for Solaris!)

If you haven’t tried Opera in a while go get it and give it a try! And don’t write it off in the first 2 minutes, check out its variety of themes and widgets and customization capabilities. If after 30 minutes you still don’t jive, then feel free to go back, but I think after 30 minutes of play you’ll be really impressed and contemplate switching!

I want to wish a hearty congratulations to our friends at Nexenta for introducing NexentaStor, the first available “OpenSolaris” (meaning Nevada, not Indiana) based storage appliance!

From the beginning, Alex Ross and the Nexenta crew have had in mind to build a business around OpenSolaris (meaning the code, not Indiana) and to leverage technology for its own ends. This was something those of us involved with OpenSolaris (meaning the community, not Indiana) early on wanted to encourage and ensure was possible. Nexenta is a shining example of what the project represents and the future of this community.

A free eval of NexentaStor Virtual Appliance is available for download. For the bare metal installable contact Nexenta.

Most of all, I want to give prop’s to Joe Little of Stanford. I get to hang out with Joe from time to time at conferences and he’s always got something amazing to show me. Keep your eyes on his blog!! If his name is new to you, get used to it now, you’ll be hearing it a lot more now that NexentaStor is released.

There are a lot of core concepts to grasp with ZFS. Frankly, power comes at the price of a learning curve. While ZFS makes storage simpler than ever, a solid grasp of the core concepts is really critical to efficient usage.

Anytime someone says “multiple filesystems” I cringe. There is no faster way to lead yourself down a confused road than to think of the zfs create command as creating a new filesystem. You’re creating a new “dataset”. Lets say it a couple times to let it sink in: dataset dataset dataset. Datasets should be thought of, first and foremost as organizational boundaries. Data demarcation if you please. With in a large structure typically called a filesystem we sub-divide the structure into independently or cooperatively controllable entities… datasets!

To ZFS there are two types of datasets: filesystem datasets and volume datasets. Filesystem datasets store file data in the traditional manner, while volume datasets are block allocations which can be used to store non-ZFS filesystems (UFS, VxFS, etc), raw data allocations (used by apps like Oracle), or offered up via technologies like iSCSI.

Each dataset has properties associated with it. A filesystem dataset has properties such as atime (whether or not to update timestamps on the file when accessed; this creates lots of additional IO you commonly don’t need), compression, mount point, etc. A volume dataset has fewer properties, such as compression, readonly, and shareiscsi.

Properties can be inherited from a parent dataset to its children, and if you wish they can be overridden in special instances. For instance, if I want to control the quota of each user directory independantly each will need an individual dataset, however if I want all of them to have a default quota of 10GB, disable atime, and enable compression, then I can set those properties on the parent dataset and each child will recieve those properties.

When I create a dataset that will not contain files but simply acts as a parent for a bunch of children datasets I refer to it as a “stub”. For instance, my pool might be called “bigpool”, my stub dataset would be “bigpool/home”, and each user directory would be a child of that stub dataset: “bigpool/home/userA”, “bigpool/home/userB”, etc.

Of course, by default the mount point would be “/bigpool/home/userA”, for instance, and thats just ugly. Therefore on my “home” stub I’d set (after disabling the the automounter; svcadm disable autofs) the mountpoint to “/home” ala zfs set mountpoint=/home bigpool/home.

If you use the old “filesystem” terminology you can quickly get confused, therefore thinking in “datasets” gives your brain something new to better attach these ideas of properties and propagation of them far more easily.

Stub datasets for the win!