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 that [...]
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 it [...]
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 of [...]
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 cable [...]
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 create [...]
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 asked [...]
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 systems [...]
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 [...]
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 currently not [...]
I knew it was only a matter of time before this happened, due to seeing high traffic in the web server logs and lots of links appearing, but today my website was Slashdotted. If you are a webmaster, this is either your best day ever, or your worst nightmare, depending on how robust your web [...]
An intriguing post appeared yesterday on the blog of Jeff Bonwick, where it simply shows photos of an informal meeting between Jeff and Linus Torvalds — could it be that Linux will get ZFS soon, due to changes in licensing, or could Linus be joining the ZFS team with Sun, or something else?
With the summer coming on, the ambient room temperature is increasing, and so here’s a handy script to help you monitor your drive temperatures to help prevent heat-related data loss.
Backups are critical to keeping your data protected, so let’s discover how to use ZFS snapshots to perform full and incremental backups.
The next thing you will want to master when running your own ZFS home fileserver is how to perform snapshots of your file systems, as this is a crucial part of helping to protect your data.
I had two Gigabit ethernet ports sitting on this motherboard and I was only using one. So I decided to take the path less travelled, as you never know where it can lead…
Considering that a fileserver at home will spend a lot (most) of its life idle, it makes sense to look at its power usage and see what steps can be taken to reduce its operational costs — i.e. power consumption.
Now that you’ve got your ZFS Home Fileserver up and running and you’ve got your file systems created and shared to other machines on your home network, now’s the time to consider getting some backup policy in place.
I’ll show a few different possibilities open to you.
The next step in setting up your own ZFS home fileserver is to set up your ZFS storage pool and file systems and then share them with other machines. The ZFS commands should work from any operating system where ZFS is available. I have used two machines in this example: a machine running Sun Solaris [...]
After deciding that I would use Sun Solaris and its ZFS file system as the foundation for a home fileserver, the next part was to select compatible hardware, as Solaris has fairly limited driver support for hardware.
After reading an article that turned out to be pure gold, namely: A Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore – The future of file systems, I felt a warm glow inside and realised that ZFS seemed to be the best solution currently available for solving a number of current problems, and I wanted to [...]
When I began my search for a suitable fileserver, I found the choice of available technologies and products quite overwhelming, with each having their own pros and cons.
Here is a list of things I considered:
Before embarking on this project I asked myself what I needed a fileserver for. That is, what would I put on there and, therefore, how much storage space would I require.
For many people who use a computer, knowing where to store growing amounts of data can become tricky.
You start off with one disk, run out of space, buy a bigger one etc. And if you have a camcorder you’ll be generating gigabytes of data for every Mini DV tape you record. Also, you may have [...]
After my Panasonic DMR-EH57 HDD/DVD video recorder refused to play DivX format video from DVD+R discs recorded on my Mac Pro’s ‘SuperDrive’, I looked for a solution and found one, which I will now describe.
With the ubiquity of digital cameras and camcorders, it is becoming ever easier to record and organise your family memories and, ironically, the safety of these recorded memories is becoming ever more jeopardised due to the flawed nature of recording media such as CD ROMs, DVDs and hard drives.