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20060125 Wednesday January 25, 2006

OpenSolaris Appliances

The OpenSolaris Appliances community is a go! So now it is time to start building some kit.

First step will be to get some consensus on which motherboards to base this around. I suspect there is also going to be some discussion around what appliances we want to build.

I want to build something that is not dissimilar in function to a Cobalt Qube 3 pro, except OpenSolaris as the base OS rather than Linux. In particular using ZFS to allow snapshots to be widely used and greater confidence in the integrity of the data.

My starting list of services would be:

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( Jan 25 2006, 10:06:05 AM GMT ) Permalink
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But to make it interesting...
  • Layer some things like a photo album, juke box, blogs, etc. on it. Don't make people write HTML.
  • Add a wireless card to it to make it into an access point.
  • Make ipsec really easy to set up so that multiple households can set up a VPN between them so that they can share files, printers, blogs, etc. securely without exposing all of those services to the internet.
  • Put a TV tuner in it and use something like Myth TV to turn it into a PVR.
  • Provide dead simple replication technology so that you can maintain (possibly encrypted) backups of your appliance on your friends/relatives appliances so you don't have to worry about backups (ZFS doesn't protect against fire or theft).
  • Use it to provide desktop sessions too. Think SunRay server.

Posted by Mike Gerdts on January 25, 2006 at 01:34 PM GMT #

I could not agree more. Actaully we have some ideas about using ZFS to do the replication using exactly what you describe.

For me though the starting point is what I descibe, but the hardware needs have the possibility to do more in the future.

Probably best to move this discussion onto <a hreg="http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=98">applicances discuss.

Posted by Chris Gerhard on January 25, 2006 at 01:45 PM GMT #

Another thing to add is an Asterisk to turn your appliance into PBX. And a DECT/GAP card to talk to all you cordless phones in the house. Oh, and squid ofcourse - caching proxy is great. And MLdonkey - let it make all your downloads, while your personal computer is busy with something productive - Quake or Unreal :)

Posted by Cyril Plisko on January 25, 2006 at 02:18 PM GMT #

The mail solution should have spam filtering. I'd be interested in looking at some information management tools, a blog or wiki.

Posted by Dave Levy on January 31, 2006 at 07:52 AM GMT #

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