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Monday June 15, 2009

OpenSolaris meets Mac OS X in Munich

Last Wednesday, Wolfgang and I had the honor to present at "Mac Treff München", Munich's local Mac User Group. There are quite a few touching points between OpenSolaris and Mac OS X, such as ZFS, DTrace and VirtualBox, we thought it would be a good idea to contact them out of our Munich OpenSolaris User Group and talk a little bit about OpenSolaris.

Breaking the Ice

We were a little bit nervous about what would happen. Do Mac people care about the innards of a different, seemingls non-GUIsh OS? Are they just fanboys or are they open to other people's technologies? Will talking about redundancy, BFU, probes and virtualization bore them to death?

Fortunately, the 30-40 people that attended the event proved to be a very nice, open and tolerant group. They let us talk about OpenSolaris in General including some of the nitty-grittyness of the development process, before we started talking about the features that are more interesting to Mac users. We then talked about ZFS, DTrace and VirtualBox:

ZFS for Mac OS X (or not (yet)?)

Explaining the principles behind ZFS to people who are only used to draging'n'dropping icons, shooting photos or video and using computers to get work done, without having to care about what happens inside, is not easy. We concentrated on getting the basics of the tree structure, copy-on-write, check-summing and using redundancy to self-heal while using real world examples and metaphors to illustrate the principles. Here's the deal: If you have lots of important data (photos, recording, videos, anyone?) and care about it (content creators...), then you need to be concerned about data availability and integrity. ZFS solves that, it's that simple. A little animation in the slides were quite helpful in explaining that, too :).

The bad news is that ZFS seems to have vanished from all of Apple's communication about the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard release. That's really bad, because many developers and end-users were looking forward to take advantage of it.

The good news is that there are still ways to take advantage of ZFS as a Mac User: Run an OpenSolaris file server for archiving your data or using it as a TimeMachine store, or even run a small OpenSolaris ZFS Server inside your Mac through VirtualBox.

DTrace: A Mac Developer/Admin's Heaven, Albeit in Jails

Next, we dove a little bit into DTrace and how it makes the OS really transparent for admins, developers and users. In addition to the dtrace(1) command, Apple created a nice GUI called "Instruments" as part of their XCode development environment that leverages the DTrace infrastructure to collect useful data about your application in realtime.

Alas, as with ZFS, there's another downer, and this time it's more subtle: While you can enjoy the power of DTrace in Mac OS X now, it's still kinda crippled, as Adam Leventhal pointed out: Processes can escape the eyes of DTrace at will, which counters the absolute observability idea of DTrace quite massively. Yes, there are valid reasons for both sides of the debate, but IMHO, legal things should be enforced using legal means, and software should be treated as software, meaning it is not a reliable way of enforcing any license contracts - with or without powerful tools such as DTrace.

OpenSolaris for all: VirtualBox

Finally, a free present to the Mac OS X community: VirtualBox. I still get emails asking me to spend 80+ dollars on some virtualization software for my Mac. There are at least two choices in that price range: VMware Workstation and Parallels. Well, the good news is that you can save your 80 bucks and use VirtualBox instead.

This may not be new to you, since as a reader of my blog you've likely heard of VirtualBox before, but it's always amazing for me to see how slowly these things spread. So, after reading this article, do your Mac friends a favour and tell them they can save precious money buy just downloading VirtualBox instead of spending money on other virtualization solutions for the Mac. It's really that simple.

Indeed, this was the part where the attendees took most of their notes, and asked a lot of questions about (ZFS being a close first in terms of discussion/questions).

Conclusion

After our presentations, a lot of users came up and asked questions about how to install OpenSolaris on their hardware and on VirtualBox. Some even asked where to buy professional services for installing them an OpenSolaris ZFS fileserver in their company. The capabilities of ZFS clearly struck some chords inside the Mac OS X community, which is no wonder: If you have lots of Audio/Video/Photo data and care about quality and availability, then there's no way around FS.

I used this event as an excuse to try out keynote, which worked quite well for me, especially because it helped me create some easy to understand animations about the mechanics of ZFS. I also liked the automatic guides a lot which help you position elements on your slides very easily and seem to guess very well what your layout intentions were. I'd love the OpenOffice folks to check out Keynote's guides and see if they can come up with something similar. So, here's a Keynote version of my "OpenSolaris for Mac Users" slides as well as a PDF version (both in German) for you to check out and re-use if you like.

Update: Wolfgang's introductory slides are now available for download as well and Klaus, the organizer of the event, posted a review in the Mac Treff München Blog with some pictures, too.

"OpenSolaris meets Mac OS X in Munich" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-06-15 02:32:51.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community dtrace mac mucosug munich opensolaris os virtualbox x zfs
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Wednesday January 14, 2009

How to get Audio to work on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox

Man playing a big trumpet My regular working environment on the go or when working from home is, of course, OpenSolaris. I've been using it on an Acer Ferrari Laptop for years now and I can say I'm very happy with it, and that's not just because I work for Sun.

Lately, I tried OpenSolaris on VirtualBox on my private MacBook Pro. This configuration turned out to work better than the native OpenSolaris on my company's Acer Ferrari laptop! Due to the MBP being 2 years newer and it having a dual-core CPU plus 4 GB of RAM, it turned out to be the better machine to host my OpenSolaris work environment.

With one exception: Audio.

Audio isn't enabled in VirtualBox by default in the Mac version and that has already been blogged elsewhere. The solution is simply to enable Audio in VirtualBox settings and select the Intel ICH AC97 soundchip.

Then, OpenSolaris doesn't come with an ICH AC97 audio driver and even the new SUNWaudiohd driver doesn't support it. The solution here is to download the OSS sound drivers from 4Front technologies. So far, so good.

But this didn't work for me: Either the sound would play for a few seconds, then hang, or the sound drivers wouldn't be recognized by GNOME/GStreamer at all, resulting in a crossed-out loudspeaker icon at the top! This is very frustrating if you want to show Brandan's excellent shouting video to an audience and have to switch out of OpenSolaris/VirtualBox back to Mac OS X just for that.

Apparently others suffered from the same annoyance, too, but neither of the solutions I found seemed to help: I installed and uninstalled and reinstalled the OSS drivers a number of times, ran the ossdevlinks script to recreate device links, even installed a newer, experimental version of the SUNaudiohd driver. No luck yet.

Then Frank, a Sun sales person who happens to use OpenSolaris on his laptop as well (Yay! a salesrep using OpenSolaris! Kudos to Frank!) suggested to uninstall the SUNWaudiohd driver, then install the OSS sound driver, which worked for him. It didn't occur to me that uninstalling SUNWaudiohd might be the solution, so I wanted to give it a try.

But, alas "pfexec pkg uninstall SUNaudiohd" didn't work for me either! Apparently there's a dependency between this package and the slim_install package bundle. Again, Google is your friend and it turned out to be a known bug that prevented me from uninstalling SUNWaudiohd. The workaround is simply to "pfexec pkg uninstall slim_install" which is no longer needed after the installation process anyway.

So lo and behold, gone is slim_install, gone is SUNWaudiohd, installed the OSS drivers, logged out and back in and audio works fine now! (Notice: no reboot required).

Here's the sweet and short way to audio goodness on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox:

Shutdown your OpenSolaris VirtualBox image if it is running, so you can change it's settings.
Activate audio for your OpenSolaris VM in VirtualBox. Select the ICH AC97 Chip. Here's a blog entry that describes the process.
Boot your OpenSolaris VirtualBox image.
Uninstall the slim_server package: "pfexec pkg uninstall slim_server"
Uninstall the SUNWaudiohd driver: "pfexec pkg uninstall SUNWaudiohd"
Download the OSS sound driver for OpenSolaris.
Install the OSS sound driver: "pfexec pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.1-1051-i386.pkg" (Or whatever revision you happened to download).
Log out of your desktop and log back in. Sound should work now.

"How to get Audio to work on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-01-14 07:32:19.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
audio drivers howto mac opensolaris solaris sound useful virtualbox
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Thursday June 26, 2008

ZFS and Mac OS X Time Machine: The Perfect Team

A few months ago, I wrote about "X4500 + Solaris ZFS + iSCSI = Perfect Video Editing Storage". And thanks to you, my readers, it became one of my most popular blog entries. Then I wrote about "VirtualBox and ZFS: The Perfect Team", which turned out to be another very popular blog article. Well, I'm glad to introduce you to another perfect team now: Solaris ZFS and Mac OS X Time Machine.

Actually, it began a long time ago: In December '06, Ben Rockwood wrote about the beauty of ZFS and iSCSI integration, and immediatley I thought "That's the perfect solution to back up my Mac OS X PowerBook!" No more strings attached, just back up over WLAN to a really good storage device that lives on Solaris ZFS, while still using the Mac OS X native file system peculiarities. But Apple didn't have an iSCSI initiator yet (they still don't have one now) and the only free iSCSI initiator I could find was buggy, unstable and didn't like Solaris targets at all.

Then, Apple announced their Time Machine technology. Many people thought that this was related to them supporting ZFS and in fact, it's easy to believe that Time Machine's travels back in time are supported by ZFS snapshots. But they aren't. In reality, it's just a clever use of hardlinks. And not a very efficient one, too: Whenever a file changes, the whole file gets backed up again, even if you just changed a little bit of it.

Last week, a colleague of mine told me that Studio Networks Solutions had updated their globalSAN iSCSI Initiator software for Mac OS X and that it now works well with Solaris iSCSI targets. I decided to give it another try. So, here are two ZFS ZVOLs sitting on my OpenSolaris 2008.05 home server:

Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.11      snv_86  January 2008

-bash-3.2$ zfs list -rt volume

NAME                             USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

santiago/volumes/aperturevault  6.50G   631G  6.50G  -

santiago/volumes/mbptm           193G   631G   193G  -

-bash-3.2$

They have both been shared as iSCSI targets through a single zfs set shareiscsi=on santiago/volumes command, thanks to ZFS' attribute inheritance:

-bash-3.2$ zfs get shareiscsi santiago/volumes

NAME              PROPERTY    VALUE             SOURCE

santiago/volumes  shareiscsi  on                local

-bash-3.2$ zfs get shareiscsi santiago/volumes/aperturevault

NAME                            PROPERTY    VALUE                           SOURCE

santiago/volumes/aperturevault  shareiscsi  on                              inherited from santiago/volumes

-bash-3.2$ zfs get shareiscsi santiago/volumes/mbptm

NAME                    PROPERTY    VALUE                   SOURCE

santiago/volumes/mbptm  shareiscsi  on                      inherited from santiago/volumes

-bash-3.2$

On the Mac side, they show up in the globalSAN GUI just nicely:

globalSAN iSCSI GUI

And Disk Utility can format them perfectly as if they were real disks:

Disk Utility with 2 iSCSI disks

Time Machine happily accepted one of the iSCSI disks and synced more than 190GB to it just fine and as I type these lines, Aperture is busy syncing more than 40GB of photos to the other iSCSI disk (it wouldn't accept a network share). Sometimes, they're busy working simultaneously :).

Of course, iSCSI performance heavily depends on network performance, so for larger transfers, a cable connection is mandatory. But the occasional Time Machine or Aperture sync in the background runs just fine over WLAN.

So finally, Solaris and Mac fans can have a Time Machine based on ZFS, with real data integrity, redundancy, robustness, two different ways of travelling through time (ZVOLs can be snapshotted just like regular ZFS file systems) and much more.

Many thanks to Christiano for letting me know and to the guys at Studio Network Solutions for making this possible. And of course to the ZFS team for a wonderful piece of open storage software!

"ZFS and Mac OS X Time Machine: The Perfect Team" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-06-26 14:40:55.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
backup globalsan iscsi mac machine os storage time x zfs
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Sunday November 04, 2007

Vote for supporting Java in Max OS X Leopard!

Just arrived in SFO and waiting for my first breakfast, but here's a good cause to support that I didn't want to miss.

If you want Java 6 in OS X Leopard to happen, express your vote by posting the magic string:

13949712720901ForOSX

in your blog. The more hots Google finds, the better. 275 hits already. I guess that's the Web 2.0 version of collecting signatures :).

More details in the Babelfish Blog.

Thanks Henry, for setting this up!

I'm now holding off my planned purchase for a new MacBook Pro for a while...

"Vote for supporting Java in Max OS X Leopard!" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-11-04 07:48:02.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
1.6 13949712720901forosx java jdk leopard mac os vote web2.0 x
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