Geetings to you in Florida! I was living there for 6 months in 1988 at Delray Beach. Had a great time in Florida, although speed cycling on Saturday mornings along the A1A was more than hot enough for me and my buddy

Yes, I think that the XBOX running XBMC is superb combination, and should work nicely.

I found speed variations too with large/small files and using rsync via the command line versus the Finder.

Yeah, 17MBytes/sec is around 60GBytes per hour of HD video. Currently I only have an SD camera but even this produces imports of around 13GBytes per hour. This is why having a massive storage area that ZFS facilitates is so important. So far though, I have only edited video from data held locally on the Mac’s hard drive, using the ZFS server as archive storage after editing is complete, and to store the full video import files from the camera. But I might give editing from ZFS storage across the network a try.

I’m not quite sure of the current situation regarding using a ZFS filesystem as a target for Time Machine backups. Last time I looked, Apple had nobbled it not to work in the migration from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2. Think they wanted to push their Time Capsule hardware.

I think there should be an upgrade option when you run the SXCE snv_b101 installer. Hopefully it should work smoothly, although when I last tried it around b80 or so, it failed, and since then I do a full install.

I do use the built-in NICs on the M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. I have snv_b101 installed now and I’m just sorting out the networking (trunking) which can be a real PITA to get working correctly

BTW, if you’d like to chat about video editing or ZFS etc, send me a comment with just your email and I’ll write back to you (and delete the post without publishing it). I’m in need of some info on HD cameras (1 CCD or 3 CCD), and also which Mac app to use, as I think I might do better investing in something like Final Cut Express instead of using iMovie/iDVD.

Cheers,
Simon

thanks again and I think that would make an interesting post, like you say.

I had been thinking of writing a post like this for a while, but due to my pedestrian immersion into the world of Solaris and ZFS etc, I have still not really grappled successfully with all of the areas of interest relating to this fileserver/NAS. So I still have a few areas to explore or return to, and I will write some posts on these subjects soon. After that, I will write the kind of summarizing post that you mention.

Thanks for posting links to these ZFS articles — I had noticed sudden huge increases in web traffic, mostly from Sweden and other Scandinavian countries

One thing though — I’m not really a die-hard Linux user, but I ran it at home for a few years. I did like using Linux a lot after I stopped using Windows at home around 2000. I used a Linux LAMP configuration to run this website prior to moving it over to a Solaris SAMP configuration. Around 2004 I bought a PowerMac and then Mac OS X became my preferred OS for home use. I found its apps and especially the multimedia apps had great usability and made using them a pleasure. Of course, with the Mac’s command line I could continue with using UNIX commands. If of interest, I wrote a brief comparison of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X here (bear in mind that it was written a couple of years ago and Linux is always improving, so…):
http://breden.org.uk/2006/11/12/windows-linux-and-mac-os-x-shootout/

Personally, as I am involved in photography (macro, event, family etc) I find the Aperture 2.0 software running on Mac OS X is a superb piece of software that helps me organise my big photo library, which is growing rapidly due to shooting in RAW format.

Then there’s GarageBand (low end), Logic Express (midrange) and Logic Studio (high end) for music production.

And for managing video productions you have great software from iMovie/iDVD (low end), Final Cut Express (midrange) and Final Cut Studio (high end).

And for software development, a Mac is great too.

So for me, for most of my needs, Mac OS X is my OS of choice on the client side, and Solaris for the server side: 1. ZFS fileserver/NAS, and 2. web server.

Cheers,
Simon

I’ll check out those posts as I have used Mediatomb with linux before. I did get XBMC up on an old XBOX a while back, i’ll just have to pull it out of closet to see if it still runs, but its nice knowing i can stream to it.
Next on the list is pulling ethernet all over the house, better do it now while its getting cool (relatively) down here in sunny Florida!

With NFS, while transferring any one large file i’ll get around 30 mbps, with peaks above 50. However, when transferring a bunch of small files (i’m using rsync, the Finder is too slow), it barely gets and stays over 2-3 mbps. This could get annoying because i’m moving over 750 GB of family movies and pictures from summer trip over the years, and some backups of documents from way back, and i have a feeling it will take all night and into tomorrow (hopefully not longer, this for some reason is eating the RAM on my mac, rendering it useless when transferring files).

The problem is not apparent using Final Cut express, when i was importing the footage it would be at about 5 mbps which is due to the video having to be processed before it gets stored (using AVCHD, has to get transcoded to AIC). When editing, I can play back in real time the timeline or any other clip without lag at all. The video shot is from a Canon HF-10, which records at it’s highest 17 mbps. This is pretty much what i see when i’m playing a clip back over the network, so this does not seem like a problem. I’d like to see what kind of speed I get (when and if) i get time machine setup to backup over the network.

Is there a way to update b99 to the most recent build, b101? I downloaded the DVD iso, and i was reading about the live update feature, but i also remember when i was re-installing over a current installation last week, i had the option to upgrade it. Is this another viable option? Can i just boot from the DVD, choose upgrade, and i’ll be on b101? I’m trying to see if I can get this reboot bug worked out, as I am still booting into the xVM option.

Sorry to hear about the boot problem, wish i had some kind of advice to give in return but im still getting used to this new system! Good luck working with that. Are you using the built-in NICs on the ASUS MB? Mine is not recognized by solaris, and i’m having to use a gigabit NIC pulled from another box. Is there a driver I can install?

Thanks again for the advice,
Brian

I dont mind if you delete this post. I just wanted to ask you this question. You can delete this post, and just write such an article. Pliiiz?

Thanks for the compliments, and I’m glad to hear you managed to get NFS working, and your setup is working nicely. What sustained write-speed are you seeing with NFS?

Also, good to see it works nicely editing HD video. I intend to get some new MiniDV tape-based HD camera soon — possibly the Sony HDR-HC9, but I need to do a bit more research first… 3 CCD or 1 CCD etc?…

A standard XBOX (not 360) running XBMC appears to be quite a neat solution for viewing video streamed from your ZFS fileserver. It is known to play audio and video compressed with almost any video/audio codecs: MPEG2 (DVD), DivX, Xvid, MP3 etc. However, the standard XBOX is not powerful enough to play MPEG4 videos as the processor doesn’t seem powerful enough to be able to decode MPEG4 fluidly in real time. Perhaps the XBOX 360 might be better — assuming that XBMC runs on it.

For the PS3 you might like to look at these posts:
http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/mediatomb_on_solaris
http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/twonkymedia_on_solaris

Ironically, I now have a boot problem with SXCE b87, which I think I caused by turning the machine off mid-boot as there seems to be some bug in the Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard’s BIOS relating to the NIC initialization process, causing the NICs not to work sometimes when booting…

Good luck,
Simon

Thanks for the great help. I was able to get NFS working, i might work with CIFS later on but for now ill stick to NFS. I also have been able to get a shared folder up for everyone to read/write to which is nice. I’m slowly transferring (over rsync) close to 700 GB of data from my iMac and external FW drive to the zpool to give the drives and the machine a workout. So far it has been on for about a day now and the fans on the case are still pushing out cold air! the hard drives are cool to the touch and i’ve had it transferring this data all morning and into the afternoon. I even tried it as a scratch disk for Final Cut Express and it worked flawlessly editing HD footage from my canon HF10. What a machine!

I have not had any time to diagnose the boot problem, but i am able to do everything booting to xVM so i will use it for now. Next step after i get all the data over and attempt time machine backups, i’ll work on getting an ubuntu virtual machine up for some media streaming. Do you know of any good media streaming programs I could use under SXCE to stream to a PS3 and xbox360? This is one of the goals of this machine, but im sure it will be further down the road.

Thanks for the help again and the great articles. Between here and the solaris forums I’ve come from having never used solaris before to feeling quite comfortable in it in about a weeks time. So far I am loving it.

brian

i am currently using the xVM option (i was able to make it the default and it seems to run normal in every aspect).
I was able to get NFS working on the macs, now I am just trying to figure out how to set permissions on the Solaris box to get a folder up for everyone in my house that is read/write. I am able to set the group ownership but i’m not sure how to get the owner to be everyone. Is there a way to do this?

I did check the HCL and although it does not list my exact MB, it does list the M3N78 HDMI and others with the M3N78 model, so i’ll just wait to see if an update will fix it. For now i just use th xVM.

Thanks so much for your help, it really has been awesome. I have never used solaris and between this blog and the opensolaris help forums i’ve got this thing up and running in under a week and hopefully soon I can get it fully implemented on my network to serve up files and (hopefully) get time machine to work with it. Unfortunately i had to send my macbook pro in for repair today so I am using the server as my desktop until it comes back next week.

Brian

Regarding the sharing, I used CIFS and to get the sharing working, check the following sections above:
- Making the storage pool accessible from other machines
- Update 30/03/2008: extra steps required for CIFS setup
- Configuring client machine access to the file system share

If it still fails then see if you can ‘tail -f /var/adm/messages’ and then try to connect to the share from the Mac again and see if any failure messages are displayed on the console. That’s how I found out why my earlier attempts to get it working were failing. I saw this on the console:

When I try to access the share from the Mac using autofs (smbfs:), I see the following message in /var/adm/messages:

Mar 27 20:38:48 solarisbox smbd[667]: [ID 653746 daemon.notice]
 SmbLogon[WORKGROUP\simon]: NO_SUCH_USER

Also, from memory, I use AHCI, and this should enable hot swap of a failed drive, in theory.

Good luck, and let me know if you (1) get the connect working and (2) if you solve the boot issue.

Cheers,
Simon

sorry to post again. I got my problem figured out ( i think). I installed SXCE B99, but am only able to boot into the ’solaris express xVM’ option at bootup. The standard option just makes the machine reboot, and failsafe does not work. Is xVM fine to use regularly? I set it as the default boot option for now so i dont have to choose it every time. I was also able to recognize the other disks, and create a zpool. My next problem is this:
how do i share over NFS to my mac leopard machine? I set sharenfs=on for the share, but when i try to mount it in OS X it tells me incorrect username or password. I have created a new user on the SXCE box for brian, made the UID the same one as my mac, changed the folder permissions to be owned by my user. I’m not sure what else i can try? i also set SMB on, and the MAC dialog that asks for username and password keeps telling me it is incorrect (and i’ve tried a few different users that i’ve made on the server).

thanks.

Thanks for your help. I have another technical question, as the computer is built(hardware wise). I have an
-asus M3N78 - PRO mother board
-AMD 2.6ghz X2 5000+ CPU
-4 GB G-Skill ddr2 RAM
-4 x 1500 GB seagate drives
-1 X 250GB seagate drive (BOOT disk)
-650W PSU
-case
-DVD-RW

My question is this: The MB has 6 SATA ports. I have three modes it can be in: AHCI, RAID, or IDE. The only way that the # 5 and 6 ports can be seen are if it is in AHCI or RAID mode (i need them for all the discs). I do not want to RAID the disks, as I will be using ZFS. and I am not sure what AHCI is. But SXCE (b99) (or opensolaris) will not boot in either mode, It hangs after I choose the SCXE install option and it says ‘SunOS release 5.11 Version….’. Do you have any ideas?
I can get opensolaris to install in AHCI mode, but then, randomly, I will get an error saying “ahci_port_reset: port (x) BSY/DRQ still set after device reset port_task_file = 0×180″.
port (x) is whatever port is geting the ahci error. The drives are fine, i ran seatools long test on them all. Is this a driver issue?

thanks.

I’ve not used OpenSolaris 2008.05 yet as I’m still running on SXCE (Nevada build 87, which is old now), so I can’t give you a definitive answer. However, SXCE is unsupported, not that that probably bothers you if it’s for a home fileserver/NAS. I do intend to try out 2008.11 though at some point in the future.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 has paid-for support available if that’s required, and it also has IPS (Image Packaging System) included, which is like the APT (advanced packaging tool) from Debian Linux. However, if I recall, IPS only allows you to update packages (apart from security fixes) if you buy an annual subscription which costs around $324 (see http://www.sun.com/service/opensolaris/index.jsp). For me, this was unacceptable for a home fileserver, although perhaps businesses consider that acceptable. See more on this here:
http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/home-fileserver-zfs-hardware/#comment-1523
http://www.sun.com/service/opensolaris/faq.xml

See here for more info, where Sun describe the differences between their offerings:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/

I’m not aware of any currently available ZFS books, but as it’s quite simple, as far as setting up a box to serve files from a ZFS file system, you can take a look at the ZFS Administration Guide: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfsadmin.pdf

I’ve described the basic steps you need to perform in the post above, but the ZFS Administration Guide goes into a lot more detail, so it is very useful.

Good luck with your build!

Simon

I am getting ready to put together a computer (well, all of the parts that i’ve purchased over a few months) that will be my ZFS file server/media server. What are the main differences between SXCE and opensolaris 2008.05? Is one better/easier to use than the other?

Are there any good books out yet pertaining to ZFS or opensolaris?

Thanks,

Brian

It’s difficult to recommend a specific processor without knowing what kind of workload you plan for your machine.

I want a dual core, low wattage, 64 bit CPU.

Should I go Intel or AMD?

Forget price/watt/performance ratios.

Which CPU would perform best in Opensolaris?

You certainly had some ‘fun’ getting it all to work

And thanks for reminding me — I was going to write up some stuff on ACLs and never got round to it yet.

Hope your system works nicely now.

Fast enough for me.

Finally.

Many thanks for all your help during my ordeal!

chmod 777 /pool
chmod A=everyone@:rwxpdDaARWcCos:fd:allow /pool/fs

I got the Asus M2N-VM HDMI. Rebuilt the machine and installed OpenSolaris svn_93. No network. Apparently the nVidia chipset doesn’t work via the Solaris drivers. I tried the nfo 3rd party drivers but couldn’t get those to work. So I popped out and bought an Intel PCI gigabit ethernet card. All good.

BTW - my friend gave me the wrong mobo model name! He had the M2A-VM

Created and shared zfs pool via NFS and CIFS. I get about 20MB/s over NFS and 30MB/s over CIFS. I’m not using my new 5e cable yet though (need the long cable so I can have box in living room plugged into TV)

So I decided to go via CIFS. I couldn’t get the /shares mount to show up in Finder like you, so I mounted in /Network/Servers via the fstab file. Lovely, worked fine.

My user/group was set properly, however, any files copied via Finder to the share were written without any permissions at all on Solaris box.

I noted my zfs pool had aclinherit=restricted whereas yours has ’secure’ I tried changing that, restarting the smb service, but the share just disappeared. Mac log said it was dead.

So .. still trying!

SATA card wasn’t recognised by my install of Solaris. I used svn_93. It’s a bug fixed in svn_94. Tried the workaround, that didn’t work. Could try it again, but I decided I want my onboard SATA ports to work.

I’ve found a board that works (my friend has it - the Asus M2N-VW HDMI). Means spending about #80 GBP (need new CPU too), rebuilding the parts and reinstalling.

Tried harware raid5 and Fedora 9 linux last night. Didn’t work.

So, my choices are:

1. Spend, wait (can’t get mobo until tomorrow), rebuild (or let the shop do it, but that means lugging it down there)
2. Go with sotware RAID5 on a Fedora 9 linux install.
3. No RAID, just go with ext3 in a big LVM on a Fedora 9 linux install.

I am a little concerned with the lack of resources for troubleshooting OpenSolaris. fedora seems a lot slicker.

Not really any useful info on Google for my mobo and solaris.

Going to try to find an SATA card and try that.

Oh, I just read that on some chipsets, when there are more than 4 SATA ports on the board, only the first four are usable properly. The others are hidden behind some ‘raidgoofyness’.

Mine are plugged in to 1,2,3 … and for some reason 5.

Could try 4!

However, as you saw from your Linux experiment, the hardware seems to be working fine. The issue seems likely to be a driver issue, or possibly a BIOS misconfiguration causing the driver to operate sub-optimally.

Oh, and you did check that you’re now using category 5e cable or greater on all computer ethernet to switch connections now?

Did you find any useful info when you searched on Google for other ZFS users using your motherboard? They must have the answers that will help you either fix the current (driver) issue, or abandon the motherboard and choose a different one that is definitely known to work (like mine if you have to).

If you decide to get my mobo, note that I am not getting very good power consumption figures (120W with 3 drives in the pool, plus an OS boot drive), due to the fact that I have an AMD processor of family 15 (see here for a full explanation: http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/home-fileserver-zfs-hardware/#comment-2130)

So it is my feeling that currently some Intel CPU’s will give you lower power consumption figures than AMD processors, as OpenSolaris has better support for CPU frequency scaling on Intel processors than AMD ones, and when the processor is idle (95% of the time probably) this is important. OpenSolaris supports CPU frequency scaling on AMD processors of family 16 plus, but that means the Barcelona processors and these appear to use between 80W and 120W — ouch!

For the sharing problem, for simplicity, ensure the user and group ids match on your Mac and Solaris boxes. If they don’t currently, then try deleting the user from Admin panel, and recreate the user with this line (replace ‘username’ and ‘groupname’ with your preferred name, of course):

On the mac, in Terminal type: id your_user_name

Record the ‘uid’ and ‘gid’ numbers (user id and group id).

As root at Solaris command line, create group for ‘groupname’ and user for ‘username’ (uid and gid to match Mac’s ids):

# groupadd -g gid groupname
# useradd -g gid -u uid -s /bin/bash -d /export/home/username -c username -m username
-g gid: adds user to group gid
-u uid: creates the userid uid for this user
-s /bin/bash: assigns the default shell to be bash for this user
-d /export/home/username: defines the home directory
-c username: creates the comments/notes to describe this user as required
-m: creates the home directory for the user username

And for your shared directory do: (1) ‘chmod 755 shared_directory’ to give your user on the mac read/write access, (2) ‘chown username shared_directory’ and (3) ‘chgrp groupname shared_directory’

Good luck.

“He says: “I’m using it [ZFS] because I’m fed up with losing data to weird RAID issues with Linux, and I believe that OpenSolaris with ZFS will be substantially more reliable long-term.”

Ah, I really do want ZFS

Couldn’t get the Samba share to display in finder either (using your method above). Could cd via terminal just fine.

Going to try RAID5 on linux next. But I think this means that it’s the opensolaris ata drivers that are causing the slowness.

So, as much as I’d like to use ZFS, I think I’ve had enough! I’ve been at this for almost a week now!

I just want a resilient file store!