The Solaris iSCSI Target Implementation: Concepts
Solaris and iSCSI are two technologies that share something in common: they are amazing technologies that have had to slug their way into the data center. Solaris puts insane amounts of power at your fingertips and iSCSI puts insane amounts of flexibility into your architecture. And so, I think its time that we start looking closely at the Solaris iSCSI Target and what it can do for you. We'll start at the beginning and work our way ...
Solaris Password Security
Every so often you learn something that your surprised you didn't already know. My ego says to hide that fact but my pragmatic side says I should help make sure others aren't naive as well. In this case I refer to Solaris password security and namely the default crypt_unix(5) algorithm. If you look at /etc/shadow on a Solaris system by default you'll see lines like this: cacti:mxqZuc0PXJ/gw:13453:::::: In this line "mxqZuc0P...
Solaris 10 Update 3 Released
Solaris 10 just gets more powerful all the time. Today Solaris 10 Update 3 (11/06) has been released. This brings a large number of features that have been in OpenSolaris for some time into the fully supported release. They include: SNIA Multipath Management API Support fsstat File-System Monitoring Tool (Very handy indeed!) ZFS Command Improvements and Changes, including RAIDZ-2, Hot-Spares, Recursive Snapshots, Promotion of Clones, ...
ZFS and iSCSI Integration: Two Great Powers Collide
OpenSolaris Build 54 is now in the wild. As of Build 53 we have an amazing powerful new feature that will ultimately become a staple of the data center: ZFS and iSCSI Integration. Its now drop dead simple to start dishing out iSCSI Targets to your network, in a way that only ZFS can provide. If you didn't already know, ZFS brings the functions of a filesystem and a volume manager together into perfect harmony. Now, when people hear ...
cuddlecomics: no. 1
Tamarah, Jason Hoffman, and I all attended a swanky Web 2.0 shin-dig courtasy of Hitachi Data Systems last night and several things became clear: people think that I (benr) am the gal at the top of the page (who is in fact my wife), and I've been depicted in cartoons/comics twice now (one private, one public) and done wrongly in both. So she, having artistic ability decided to take the challange of setting things straight in her mind. The ...
Superman II – The Richard Donner Cut
Tamarah and I stopped in Target tonight to pick up Superman Returns and some diapers (husbands secret plot: buy a Wii) when I stumbled across something entirely unexpected and that I'd not previously been aware of: Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut. Tam and I just finished watching it and... wow. Un-frickin'-believable! Absolutely worth every single penny. This flick demands to be in any geeks library. Let me explain... If ...
The New Face of Systems Administration
It occurs to me that this guy has become the new face of system administration: Splunk has splattered this guys face everywhere it seems. And why not? He's a big lovable guy. Don't you just wanna hug him? So is this the new image of SA's? Less BOFH and more... I dunno, whatever he is. The natural upshot is that the more comfortable they feel the more likely they'll actually listen to what you tell them... one can hope anyway. ...
Time Management: Checkup
I read Thomas Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators when I was at Homestead and needed to better organize myself. There the problem was that I had several very long running projects that moved along so slowly that they'd get lost in the day-to-day shuffle or just outright forgotten. At Joyent things are much different, I'm not in an extremely fast moving and constantly evolving environment servicing hundreds of customers ...
Review: OGIO Bags
I've had a Sun messenger bag for eons, my signature bag of choice featuring my old TAOS tags and several charms I've accumulated over the years at various confs... but when I came to Joyent I was given an 15" MacBook Pro and my trusty bag didn't have a laptop compartment. I've never really been a laptop fan really, to me they are really just a portable console, little more. But it was time to get a new bag so that I didn't have to carry both ...
Benchmarking Your Web App With Fasterfox
I had a real problem when I arrived at Joyent, people would complain about page load times, web apps "feeling slow", or judgments on server performance based on page serving. What I needed was a way to quantify page loads so that I could measure the effects of change to the underlying structure. Did tweaking PostgreSQL's query cache actually help? How much did it help? Whats the effect of turning this nob? These are all questions that I ...