OpenSolaris


I've been involved in OpenSolaris Governance from the very beginning, but I've remained silent about it in this blog all that time because I didn't feel it was at a place where most people should really worry about it. That time has ended. If you are interested in OpenSolaris Governance, now is the time to start caring, learning, watching, and getting involved. To briefly bring you up to date, we've always know that for OpenSolaris to ...

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Alan DuBoff announced that yours truly will be presenting this Thursday night. I'll be talking about what we're doing at Joyent, share some experiences working with Sun and with running OpenSolaris, ZFS, and Thumpers in production and touch on a lot of areas such as: Nevada X4100's Containers Accounting Resource Control DTrace Troubleshooting in the real world ...and much much more. Plus, I'll have Joyent "FSCK YOU" shirts to ...

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So long 2006…

Posted on January 1, 2007

2006 just became history. A very long and strange year for me. Very little remarkable happened, and perhaps thats as it should, I'm settling into life a bit more. But sometimes keepin' on can be a sign of something positive, that its working, and growing, and maturing. So it is with me and so it is with OpenSolaris. 2006 was an important period in time for OpenSolaris. The fury of excitement surrounding Solaris going open faded ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Mongrel Cluster Under SMF Control

Posted on November 28, 2006

I've got the best users hands down. I'm really proud of the work of Mr. Mark Cornick and his recent Mongrel, meet SMF; SMF, meet Mongrel blog entry in which he shares his excellent manifest for handling Mongrel's as a service under SMF, including Capistrano tasks. This manifest first popped up in the TextDrive Containers Forum after I posted a HOWTO for users interested in harnessing the power of SMF, which I'm fairly proud of: HOWTO: ...

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Joyent & Sun: The Movie

Posted on October 17, 2006

Hi... remember me? I used to blog and stuff. But like, now, I have to actually work for a living. It was nice at Homestead, my former place of employment, because I'd been there long enough to have automated and built almost everything. I did like maybe 3 hours of real work a day. It was sweet, and I blogged a lot. But, now I'm a new guy with lots of stuff to design and build, no sleep for me. Wanna see the guys I work for? Sun ...

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In a strange turn of events, I logged into the Sun Beta site to start downloading the S10U3 Beta DVD ISO to my Joyent Jumpstart server so that I could load it onto my test Thumper and I see this message: The inclusion of iSCSI Target Disk Support in the [thingy] was an error. This feature is not in S10 11/06 Beta and will not be in S10 11/06 RR. This is a massive bummer. Currently Joyent is running on OpenSolaris B43. I was ...

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ZFS within a Zone: Using Datasets

Posted on October 1, 2006

Around B43 Solaris Zones were given a new configuration attribute: dataset. This allows us to provide ZFS within a zone itself. Before I continue, I think we should talk about ZFS terminology for a second. When I first started out with ZFS I found this idea of nested filesystems a bit odd. I remember watching the flash demo's created by Dan Price and wondering why he kept creating filesystems within filesystems. When I see /storage/...

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Trusted Extensions

Posted on October 1, 2006

Documentation has just been released for Solaris Trusted Extensions, find the docs here at docs.sun.com. I had the great joy of seeing a presentation on Trusted Extensions at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group (SVOSUG) meeting this week where Glenn Faden presented (his slides are here, see the comments for a PDF version). While a lot of the goodies created for Trusted Solaris have been with us for a long time it was interest...

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