Solaris Automated File Integrity Checking: bartlog
The Solaris Basic Audit & Reporting Tool, bart, is a great little alternative to Tripwire or AIDE. While not nearly so robust or full featured, it does what you need it to do with very little impact. The sqlite of intrusion detection systems, if you will. I blogged about BART in 2005 and so far its still only got 1 real comment, which was simply mentioning AIDE as an alternative. No love. Given that BART is awesome and no one seems to ...
Crashing Solaris for Fun and Profit
Crashing is the wrong title actually. We're talking about panics. Its sort of like saying "hacking" when you mean "cracking". A "crash" is when an OS preforms some operation that typically causes the system to reboot. Solaris is very unique from rival Linux in that 99% of the time such an event will be caught by the OS and handled as a "panic" instead of an uncontrolled crash. While its not a sexy feature of Solaris, panics are ...
CommunityOne/JavaOne Wrapup
CommunityOne is done, and JavaOne is passing by. As usual a great show. There is no way to even compare other events with that of JavaOne and associated events. The energy was high this year, although under a big "what is Oracle going to do??" cloud of fear. From a OpenSolaris perspective there were a great number of fantastic talks. Of special interest was emerging technologies that have tremendous disruptive potential, such as ...
CommunityOne Domination
I'm up to 3 sessions! Come say "hi" at CommunityOne West... I'll be: Presenting a 50 minute ZFS talk on Monday June 1st, focusing on features and application. Presenting a 20 minute Use Case for Crossbow at the Crossbow BOF Monday evening. Presenting a 2 hour zero-to-hero Becoming a ZFS Ninja "deep dive" on Tuesday. Lots of quality goodies at the show. If you have any suggestions for storage topics I should cover in my 50 minute ...
Nirvanix: Cloud hype at its most annoying
Nirvanix is a cloud storage company that offers several solutions around their Storage Delivery Network(SDN). Nirvanix is at its core an API-based cloud storage solution, similar to Amazon S3. In fact, what they've done is simply created a "better-s3-than-s3", solution which adds a lot of intelligence to the backend storage to give you the benefits of global load balancing and Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities. As the CEO says, ...
Understanding ZFS: Prefetch
One of the great mysteries of ZFS is prefetch. Failing to understand these, how they work, and what they intend to do for you, can cause a lot of confusion, so here we'll dig our fingers into the subject. The first thing to understand is that "ZFS Prefetch" may refer to file-level prefetch and/or the virtual device read-ahead cache; we'll discuss both here. VDev Read-Ahead Cache (SPA) When reading data from spinning media, the bulk ...
Become a ZFS Ninja at CommunityOne West
JavaOne is coming up, the first week of June, and that means CommunityOne is back! There is a whole week of goodness, starting with the HA Cluster Summit Sunday May 31st, then CommunityOne June 1st thru the 3rd, and JavaOne the rest of the week. On June 2nd, I'll be giving a 2 hour zero-to-hero talk on ZFS to give you Ninja like skills. Here is a brief outline of the talk: Creating Pools & Layout Schemes (RAID) Pool Maintena...
ONStor Pantera LS 2100: ZFS in a Can
Here's something in the "old news I didn't catch" dept... ONStor Pantera LS 2100 "a breakthough storage platform that delivers enterprise class features at entry level prices." Why do we care? Its ZFS based. Joining similar storage solutions NexentaStor and almighty Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (aka Amber Road + FishWorks). ONStor is offering two configs: The LS 2130: 4 Intel Cores, 8GB of RAM, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ...
Home Office Geekdom: Two Paths to Glory
I need to buy a new office chair. My $100 Ikea office chair that I've used for the last couple years finally is beyond what duck-tape and super-glue can remedy and its time for a change. In looking at Ikea's current selection of chairs I see no equivalent replacement and thus am having to look elsewhere. So I take a trip to my local OfficeDepot store and see what they have.... a big line up of high cost low quality chairs. Suddenly I'm ...
What now… Facing the Post-Sun Era
The initial shock of the Oracle deal is starting to fade. Without doubt there will be lingering regret, sadness, and quite rightly anger, for years to come. Some have referred to Sun as being as much a religion as a company, and for some of us that perhaps more true that we wish to admit. In that light, placations like "its business, not personal" is little consolation. We've lost something and an era has past into history, much like DEC, ...