Category archives: Storage

Home Fileserver: Handling pool errors

Until today I had never encountered even one read, write or checksum error on my ZFS NAS. Today I saw one checksum error coming from the mirrored SSD root boot pool which I have just installed. Unless you’re using a file system like ZFS (or NetApp / Veritas…$$$), then you’ll almost certainly never even know […]

Home Fileserver: ZFS boot pool recovery

If you should be unlucky enough to be unable to boot your OpenSolaris NAS one day, then these notes taken from a real restoration test might help you get back up and running again quickly. After setting up a supposedly robust mirrored ZFS root boot pool here using two SSD drives, I decided to give […]

Home Fileserver: Mirrored SSD ZFS root boot

When I started using this ZFS NAS for additional tasks, I realised that my boot environment was becoming more important, and was a weak point in this system. Initially I wanted to run a master copy of this website locally on this ZFS server, and that entailed installing WordPress and the OpenSolaris AMP package comprising […]

Home Fileserver: OpenSolaris 2009.06

After running SXCE for the last year, due to a failed hardware upgrade, it was time to install OpenSolaris 2009.06. I was due to leave on a trip the next morning, but foolishly I decided to install a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay with some anti-vibe rubber grommets installed. When re-attaching the IDE […]

Home Fileserver: ZFS File Systems

Once you’ve built your ZFS home fileserver / NAS, you’ll want to create your storage pool, create your file systems and share them to various devices around the home, such as laptops, PC’s, Macs, media centres etc. I will go through all the necessary steps from start to finish, so you can see how to […]

Home Fileserver: A Year in ZFS

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as ‘A Year in Provence’, does it? Oh well, never mind. 😉 After a year of using Solaris and ZFS for a home fileserver, I thought I would share my experiences here to give an insight into things that worked or did not work. Also, others have […]

FAA using ZFS

Quote from eWeek.com: The embattled FAA, which has suffered a number of embarrassing flight-plan system crashes this year, has upgraded its legacy internal business systems to a new open-systems server and storage infrastructure supplied by Sun Microsystems and an IP network provided by Cisco Systems. If all goes as planned, this architecture may replace critical […]

Home Fileserver: Active Directory Integration

Matt Harrison wrote to me recently, to notify me about a guide he’d written showing how to integrate a ZFS-based OpenSolaris fileserver with Microsoft Active Directory. His guide covers all the necessary areas like: configuring Kerberos, synchronizing time/dates, enabling the CIFS server, joining the domain, user and group mapping, ZFS datasets, setting ACLs and auto-sharing […]

Home Fileserver: RAIDZ expansion

Recently I decided to expand the storage capacity of my ZFS home fileserver’s ZFS storage pool, which was configured to use a single RAIDZ vdev comprising of three 750 GB drives. I wanted to expand the RAIDZ vdev by adding one extra 750 GB drive. As you may or may not be aware, it is […]