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I've been away from blogging for a bit. I started blogging due to some encouragement from the OpenSolaris pilot crew and Jim Grisanzio, but then the OpenSolaris launch was so amazingly full of life and expert blogging, I didn't feel like there was much more to say. But life has settled down a little bit and perhaps I will be able to find the time.
So what's new? Well, lots of things... apologies for a 'portmanteau' blog post, I will behave myself and categorise entries properly following this one.
On the Solaris front I recently dipped my toe into Solaris x86. Previously over about 10 years of using Solaris, I had never seen or logged into an x86 incarnation. I converted an old Linux machine I had lying around unused and got b27a installed fairly easily. Netbooting, loopback filesystems and endian-neutral DVD images should make this all extremely convenient for the well-organised, however for hardware where it's unknown whether the OS will install, I prefer good old fashioned CD images. After all if there is a good chance that the install may fail at any point, then it makes sense to sit and babysit the process... so then feeding in CDs every few images is not much additional hassle. That's my excuse anyway.
The nominal reason for all this was I wanted to play with ZFS and the machine seemed like a nice target since it has 4 scsi drives. I got as far as making a mirrored pool and filesystem and mounting it and creating a txt file. It really is as simple as the blogs from the ZFS team claim. Very impressive. I plan to use the mirrored space for my most critical files - my documents, email, programming projects and digital photos. I've been distracted from getting any further by problems with the X11 configuration (naturally, I always have problems with this it seems) and also the NIC configuration.
The machine has a genuine DEC Tulip chipset 10/100 ethernet card, which unfortunately cannot be persuaded to run at anything better than 10Mb half-duplex under Solaris. Fairly horrible for a machine I am prepping to be a fileserver. I tried various setting in /kernel/drv/dnet.conf including a reconfiguration boot each time, but to no avail.
First impressions are that Solaris x86 on this machine, in its default install, is a bit of a dog. Slow to start, slow to shut down and not that snappy in between. However, I am sure this is partly because lazily installing the entire set of software on a machine with only 256MB RAM, as I did, makes no sense. It was a first install, I plan to do it again when a ZFS enabled build makes it to an official Solaris 10 point release, or perhaps Solaris 11 comes out. And ... yes, I did know that I could pick and choose the packages myself if I wanted to. For a first install the urge is always to finish the job and she what the machine can do.
On the other hand, Solaris nicely recognized both SCSI host adapters and didn't barf when it noticed the IDE channel is idle. Yes, this is a PC with nothing connected to the IDE controller : SCSI hard disks, SCSI cd-burner, SCSI tape drive, SCSI zip drive. Has an original Athlon 750Mhz slot-A cpu. In 2001 this was something of a dream machine in my eyes.
For my trusty Sun Blade 1000 I upgraded the backup facilities. As much as my DDS3 drive gave good service, a Quantum DLT7000 is a significant step up. I managed to get a factory refurb with very low hours on the heads for about $300 on Ebay. 35GB native capacity and DLT tapes have a bit more reassuring heft and solidity than DAT tapes. Some people apparently feel that the non-helical-scan formats are a more reliable choice for backups, I wouldn't know, but choice is always useful. I can for example backup up selections from that machine to cheap, ubiquitous DDS3 media, but occasionally do an archival level 0 dump to good old DLT tape and put it away for safekeeping.
Other stuff I'll blog :