Archive
Posts from 2009
Configuring jumpstart to install Solaris on a ZFS root
I was playing around with ZFS root a week or two back, and wanted to be able to create the ZFS root pool and associated file systems (dump device, swap, /var) through jumpstart. To install to a ZFS root pool, you can add the "pool" directive to your client profile: The entry above breaks down as follows: The device list can contain a single device for non-mirrored configurations, or multiple devices for mirrored configurations. If you specify a mirrored configuration, you will need to include the "mirror" keyword in your profile: If you are using live upgrade, you can also name the boot environment with the "bootenv" keyword. This is pretty cool stuff, and it's nice having the various ZFS features (checksums, snapshots, compression, etc.) available in the root pool!
$ read more →Awesome MySQL performance blog
I came across Neelakanth Nadgir's blog while doing some research, and his performance analysis tools (cmdtruss and inniostat) are pretty sweet. If you are looking to learn more about MySQL performance, you should take a look at High Performance MySQL and the Sun engineering blogs. There is some awesome stuff out there!
$ read more →Automating ZFS snapshots with the SMF auto-snapshot service
One of the nice features of ZFS is the ability to take file system snapshots, which you can then use to recover perviously deleted data. In recent opensolaris and Nevada builds, there are several auto-snapshot services that can be used to schedule hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshots: To enable scheduled snapshots (these services are disabled by default), you can enable one or more of these services with svcadm. Once enabled, these services will create a cron entry in the zfssnap users crontab: The cron jobs are used to schedule the automated snapshots, and are added and removed when one of the services are enabled or disabled. I'm not entirely clear why the auto-snapshot author didn't use "*" in the daily and hourly entries, but hopefully there is a good reason…
$ read more →Getting To Know the Linux Kernel Virtualization Machine (KVM)
I gave a talk last night on theLinux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) at the local Linux users group. The talk gives some background on KVM, and shows how to get KVM working on a server that supports processor virtualization extensions. The slides are available on my website, and I will try to get them linked to the presentation section of the ALE website. Thanks to everyone who came out…
$ read more →Documentation on the Solaris NFS client and server implementations
My good friend Clay sent me a link to Vallish Guru's blog, which contains a number of PDFs that describe the Solaris NFS client and server implementations. I read through the NFSv3 RFC and Brent Callaghan's awesome book on NFS a while back, and both of these resources came in handy while I was reading through some of the PDFs. The fact that NFS has been alive for over 20 years amazes me, and it's awesome to see that the NFS folks are taking it in new and interesting directions.
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