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Posts in Storage
Creating happy little block devices with UDEV
I'm a long time admirer of Bob Ross and the amazing paintings he produced on his hit tv show the joy of painting. I'm equally a fan of udev and the power it places in administrators hands. While Bob painted amazing clouds, seascapes and mountains with a swipe of his brush I'm able to make /dev just as beautiful with a few keyboard strokes (I guess that makes my keyboard my easel). This past weekend I decided to clean up and automate the device creation process on several of my database servers…
$ read more →Locating WWPNs on Linux servers
I do a lot of storage-related work, and often times need to grab WWPNs to zone hosts and to mask storage. To gather the WWPNs I would often times use the following script on my RHEL and CentOS servers: This produced consolidated output similar to: While doing some research I came across sysfsutils, which contains the incredibly useful systool utility. This nifty little tool allows you to query sysfs values, and can be used to display all of the sysfs attributes for your FC adapters: This output is extremely useful for storage administrators, and provides everything you need in a nice consolidated form. +1 for systool!
$ read more →A great introduction to ZFS de-duplication
I've been looking into deploying ZFS de-duplication, and I have one application in particular (backup staging) that would greatly benefit from it. George Wilson did an awesome introduction to ZFS de-duplication video, and it's a great place to get started. I'm planning to start testing out de-duplication as soon as my SSDs are ordered, and hopefully I will have some positive results to report!
$ read more →An interesting way of looking at file system versioning (ZFS feature flags)
I got a chance to catch up with a bunch of stuff in my "need to read" / "need to watch" folder this past weekend. One of the videos I watched talked about ZFS feature flags, and how they will be used by the Illumos community to add new features to ZFS. ZFS feature flags make a lot of sense, and will definitely be invaluable once ZFS is extended by more than one organization. Cool video, and well worth the ten minutes it takes to watch it.
$ read more →Installing ZFS on a CentOS 6 Linux server
As most of my long term readers know I am a huge Solaris fan. How can't you love an Operating System that comes with ZFS, DTrace, Zones, FMA and Network Virtualization amongst other things? I use Linux during my day job, and I've been hoping for quite some time that Oracle would port one or more of these technologies to Linux. Well the first salvo has been fired, though it wasn't from Oracle…
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