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20071021 Sunday October 21, 2007

How to burn high resolution DVD-Audio DVDs on Solaris and Linux (And it's legal!)


This weekend I've burned my first DVD-Audio DVD with high resolution music at 96 kHz/24 Bit.

It all started with this email I got from Linn Records, advertising the release of their Super Audio Surround Collection Vol 3 Sampler (Yes, targeted advertising works, but only if customers choose to receive it), which is offered in studio master quality FLAC format files, as a download. Gerald and I applauded Linn Records a few months ago for offering high quality music as lossless quality downloads, so I decided to try out their high resolution studio master quality offerings.

The music comes as 96kHz/24 Bit FLAC encoded files. These can be played back quite easily on a computer with a high resolution capable sound card, but computers don't really look good in living rooms, despite all the home theater PC and other efforts. The better alternative is to burn your own DVD-Audio and then use a DVD-A capable DVD player connected to your HiFi-amplifier to play back the music.

There's a common misconception that "DVD-Audio" means "DVD-Video" without the picture which is wrong. DVD-Video is one standard, aimed at reproducing movies, that uses PCM, AC-3, DTS or MP2 (mostly lossy) for encoding audio, while DVD-Audio sacrifices moving pictures (allowing only still ones for illustration) so it can use the extra bandwidth for high resolution audio, encoded as lossless PCM or lossless MLP bitstreams. Also, note that it is not common for regular DVD-players to accept DVD-Audio discs, they must state that they can handle the format, otherwise you're out of luck. Some if not most DVD-Audio Discs are hybrid in that they offer the content stored in DVD-Audio format additionally as DVD-Video streams with one of the lossy DVD-Video audio codecs so they can be played on both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio players.

 

Now, after having downloaded a bunch of high-res FLAC audio files, how can you create a DVD-Audio disc? Here's a small open source program called dvda-author that does just that: Give it a bunch of FLAC or WAV files and a directory, and it'll create the correct DVD-A UDF file structure for you. It compiles very easily on Solaris so I was able to use my Solaris fileserver in the basement where I downloaded the songs to. Then you give the dvda-author output directory along with a special sort file (supplied by dvda-author) to mkisofs (which is included in Solaris in the /usr/sfw directory) and it'll create a DVD ISO image that you can burn onto any regular DVD raw media. It's all described nicely on the dvda-author How-To page. Linn Records also supplies a PNG image to download along with the music that you can print and use as your DVD-Audio cover.

And how about iPods and other MP3-Players? Most open source media players such as the VideoLan Client (VLC) can transcode from high resolution FLAC format to MP3 or AAC so that's easily done, too. For Mac users, there's a comfortable utility called XLD that does the transcoding for you.

Here's common misconception #2: Many people think AAC is proprietary to Apple, mostly because Apple is heavily advertising its use as their standard for music encoding. This is wrong. AAC is actually an open standard, it is part of the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 specification and it is therefore the legitimate successor to MP3. AAC delivers better audio quality at lower bitrates and even the inventors of MP3, the Fraunhofer IIS institute treat AAC as the legitimitate successor, just check their current projects page under the letter "A". Apple developed the "Fairplay" DRM extension to Quicktime (which is the official MPEG-4/AAC encapsulation format) to be able to sell their iTunes Music Store as a download portal to the music industry. Fairplay is proprietary to Apple, but has nothing to do with AAC per se.

As much as I love Apple's way of using open standards wherever possible, I don't think it's a good thing that their marketing department creates the illusion of these technologies being Apple's own. This is actually an example of how AAC suffers in the public perception because people think it's proprietary where the opposite is true.

How is the actual music, you ask? Good. The album is a nice mixture of jazz and classical music, both in smooth and in more lively forms, great for a nice dinner and produced with a very high quality. Being a sampler, this album gives you a good overview of current Linn Records productions, so you can choose your favourite artists and then dig deeper into the music you liked most.

There's one drawback still: The high-res files available on the Linn Records download store are currently stereo only, while the physical SACD releases come with 5.1 surround sound. It would be nice if they could introduce 5.1 FLAC downloads in the future. That would make downloading high resolution audio content perfect, and this silly SACD/DVD-Audio/Dolby-TrueHD/DTS-HD Master Audio war would finally be over.


P.S.: A big hello to the folks at avsforum.com who were so kind to link to my previous high resolution audio entry!

 

"How to burn high resolution DVD-Audio DVDs on Solaris and Linux (And it's legal!)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-10-21 04:45:44.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

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20071016 Tuesday October 16, 2007

Walking through the CEC 2007 JavaFX Message Prompter Source

The CEC Message Prompter in Action

 
Now that I'm back from CEC and out of jetlag, I've had some time to clean up  the CEC 2007 Message Prompter source code. Thanks to all those who asked for it, that was quite a motivation.

The CEC Message Prompter source code is free for your reading pleasure under an as-is basis, no warranty, no support, etc. Still, comments are of course very welcome.

The easiest way to try this out is to load up NetBeans (I use the current Beta 6), install the JavaFX module, then create a new JavaFX project. The stuff in the source code archive goes into the src subdirectory of your new JavaFX project. Choose "Main.fx" as the main class and feel free to enable Java Web Start.

In order to compile/run the app, you also need JAXB 2.0 (or use J2SE 6) and the mySQL JDBC Connector installed in NetBeans as libraries and assigned to the project you use for this app.

After starting the app, you'll see the window above. To the top is the message source selection GUI. Choose whether you want to have a database or a URL (for XML) connection. A sample XML file with some messages is included, so you probably want to use the URL method. Enter the file URL where you have your messages stored into the URL field, then click on the right (next) or left (previous) or the X (clear) buttons to display the messages. The optional Session field is for filtering messages by session ID but we never got to use it yet. 

Before I start with the code, a few words of introduction: This is my first JavaFX project and I welcome any suggestions on how to better code in JavaFX. It is also my first Java/NetBeans project since a long time, so I'm sure I can still learn a lot more about how to properly do it. But the learning journey into creating this app has been a fun and instructive one, so I hope this code can help others learn more about JavaFX too. If I had to do it again (And I hope I will, next year), I'd do some stuff differently, which I'll discuss at the end of this posting. 

Let's walk through the code in roughly the order of how the message flow works:

  • The basic idea is this:
  1. The audience sends their questions, feedback, messages etc. to the CEC backstage team through either Email, Instant Messaging or SMS through special Email or IM accounts or mobile phone numbers. The CEC backstage team reads the messages and stores them in a database where they can be approved, marked for deletion, marked for display on the Message Prompter and assigned a sequence to display in.
  2. The CEC Message Prompter is the application that the people on stage and occasionally the audience see/s and where the current question to be asked to the people on stage is displayed. So the app has to fetch messages from the database and display them on screen on demand and in a visually intuitive way.
  3. For testing/development/backup purposes, the Message Prompter can also accept messages out of a single XML file instead of a database.
  • The top level directory is supposed to go into the src subdirectory of a NetBeans JavaFX project, but I guess you could as well include this easily into any other IDE or just work from the command-line out of this directory. CECMessage.xsd is an XML schema courtesy of Simon Cook that defines the XML format for a list of messages. ExampleMessages.xml contains a bunch of messages for testing purposes. Most of the source code is in the cecmessaging subdirectory which is the name of the Java package bundle for this app. If you apply the Message schema to the JAXB xjc.sh script, it creates the java classes in the org/netbeans/xml/schema/cecmessage directory which describe the corresponding java objects.
  • Some things are best left to real Java, in this case the message fetching and conversion into JavaFX digestable classes. The nice thing about JavaFX is that it can seamlessly use Java classes for doing any heavy-lifting. Messages can come in as an XML file or from a database, in both cases they are fetched from Java helper classes that handle the complexity of fetching messages and who return an object structure to the main JavaFX application.
    In the case of messages coming in as a single XML file, the file is parsed by the XMLHelper class in cecmessaging/XMLHelper.java using the JAXB framework. The resulting object structure can then be interpreted by the JavaFX main class. Make sure you include JAXB 2.0 or later if you use J2SE 5, in J2SE 6 it's already included.
    If messages are to be retrieved from a database, then the DBHelper class in cecmessaging/DBHelper.java is used. It uses the mySQL JDBC connector for database access but you could easily plug in any other database connector. For simplicity, the database data is converted into a JAXB structure as if it was coming out of an XML document. Here is the definition of the database that Simon created:

    Database: cec Table: message
    FieldType
    idint(11)
    sendervarchar(100)
    messagetext
    topicvarchar(100)
    timeSenttimestamp
    session_idint(11)
    devicevarchar(10)
    approvedtinyint(1)
    deletedtinyint(1)
    to_be_askedtinyint(1)
    display_sort_orderint(11)

    Both XMLHelper and DBHelper sort the messages by the displayOrder field, then by id. The sort comparator for this particular ordering is in CECMessageComparator.java.
  • The heart of the Message Prompter lives in cecmessaging/Main.fx.
    • It starts with a few data structures:
      • The AnimValues class stores font sizes, colors, duration and other parameters used for animation. JavaFX does not let you specify defaults as part of the class definition, hence the attribute commands.
      • The Message class is modeled after the corresponding JAXB CECMessage class. It adds a few attributed to track a particular message's color and font size. The font size and color of a message depends on its position (whether it is highlighted or not) and can change while it is animated during transitions. That's why we need to keep track of them. The alive attribute is not used right now, it may become useful if I rework the animation stuff.
      • The Tag class is for handling, well, tags. Every word that shows up as a message, author, device or topic is treated as a tag and a tag cloud is generated based on how often the word shows up on the screen. This class stores the tag word, counts the number of appearance and stores the current font size of that tag on screen. Again, we need to track font size for animation.
      • The MessageList class is the main model class the application uses. It contains an AnimValue class, a list of Message class messages and list of tags. It knows where the messages come from and where the original message data in JAXB format is. It keeps track of the GUI Labels that graphically represent the messages on screen plus it knows how many messages to display at once, which one is to be highlighted and other useful parameters.
    • The following operation statements are really methods. They are written in script-like manner rather than in object-oriented manner. This means that they are not associated to a particular class other than the main one. Next time, I might use a more strict object-oriented approach, but hey, this is a scripting language, isn't it?
      • MessageSignature computes a single string out of all fields in a message for comparison purposes. Somehow .equals or .toString didn't work for me as expected, so Implemented this simple mechanism to see if two messages are equal.
      • ClearMessages clears all messages, its associated Label objects and makes sure that dying messages are animated and their tags updated. Actually, today the death of a message isn't animated yet but I hope to implement a nice way of dying for messages. I loved my Apple Newton back then in the 90ies and it had this nice animation where deleted stuff would vanish in a puff of smoke :).
      • CecmToMessage takes a JAXB message created by the XMLHelper or DBHelper class and creates the corresponding JavaFX Message instance. It also handles basic true/false associations for the approved and deleted fields, which are meant to be boolean but are actually strings in the XML schema.
      • MessageToLabel creates a Java Swing Label object that displays the message on screen. The nice thing about the JavaFX Label implementation is that it understands HTML. So we can use HTML freely here to control how the message is to be seen. Notice the bind statement where the Label text is: It ties the Label's text content to the Message's attributes (color, size, content). This means that whenever any of these attributes are changed in the Message object, the corresponding Label object is changed as well! This is a very nice mechanism for Model-View-Controller like programming and a big time saver when coding.
      • The messageDisplayable function decides whether a message is supposed to be displayed. This is just a logic expression checking the approved, deleted and toBeAsked fields and filtering by sessionId (In case one wants to restrict messages to a particular session). One could have implemented the filtering at the XMLHelper or at the DBHelper level, but I felt it would be better to have full control over displaying messages from the app itself.
      • UpdateMessages checks all currently displayed messages against their counterparts in the XML file or the DB. The idea here is that we want to be able to change a message even if it's already displayed in the application (you know, when accidentally a bad word came through :) ). This is called regularly before adding new messages to the screen.
      • compareMessageOrder does just that. Messages come in already sorted, but we still need to decide on ordering when going through them to detect whether a message is missing etc. (The naming is wrong, it should start uppercase. This is because this operation started as a function but then if-then is not accepted in functions by JavaFX...).
      • NextMessage adds a message to the display list. It also deals with the unexpected complexity of deciding which message to highlight in certain corner cases. For instance, when we want to preview 2 messages, the third one is to be highlighted, but if you only have 0-2 messages on screen, the highlight should be on the last etc. When done, the message animator is called to animate any newly higlighted or unhighlighted messages and the tags are updated.
      • PreviousMessage does the opporsite of NextMessage. Again, the handling of the highlight is a tad more complex than I would have wanted it. Again, we animate here as well.
      • RefreshTags goes through all messages displayed on screen and makes sure the tag list is up to date. Then it starts animation for those tags that have changed.
      • AnimateMessages checks all messages and whether their font sizes match their position and highlighting status. Then, it animates all messages that have changed their status into their destination sizes and colors. Animation is handled through the dur operator. It assigns a list of values to a single parameter in sequence, during a specified time. So when we want a piece of text to grow from 0 to 20 pixels in size during 500 milliseconds, we say something like text.size = [0..20] dur 500. Very nice! Color animations work by applying a string array with the color values in sequence to a string variable. I wasn't confident on how the animation works in terms of concurrency (for instance, if another thread happens to change a value while it is animated) and I've seen cases where the font sizes weren't correct (and that cost me quite some sweat drops!) so I added some watchdog code to make sure the font size is correct after the end of the animation. Now that I've seen the CEC 2007 JavaFX session (sic!), I know a bit more about how this is supposed to work so hopefully I won't need it any more :).
      • AnimateTags does similar things to the tags, a tad easier to do.
      • The LoadProperties stuff is not used at the moment, so isn't the properties file included with the source. I was planning to outsource all relevant defaults and constants into an external properties file, but didn't have the time to do it. But here's a start...
      • The Main part is fairly straight forward: It first instantiates the MessageList model structure with some default values, then proceeds to instantiate the GUI elements. Another nice thing about JavaFX is the declarative syntax where you just write down the GUI class with all the desired values and the runtime system takes care of instantiating the classes, hooking them together and assigning values to them, as well as tying in the methods to be called when a GUI element is activated. Also, the bind command is your best friend here in that it automatically binds GUI attributes to the model classes and saves you the hassle of implementing callback methods etc. You don't even need a GUI builder, just write down the widget hierachy and you're done. Very convenient.

That was it. All in all, learning JavaFX was a fun experience. And you can do it too, just go to the OpenJFX website and check out the tutorials and references.

What would I do differently if I had to write this app from scratch? Probably one or more of the following:

  • Use real object oriented style by attaching methods to classes etc. Possibly different classes in different files, loosely coupled by the main class, as in this nice Mariah Carey website example.
  • Rework the animation so it works on triggers. Triggers are a way of coupling code to variables, similar to binding. So, whenever a variable is changed, the trigger code gets executed. For instance, the tags could be updated and animated using triggers.
  • Introduce more eye-candy. JavaFX comes with full Java2D support, so I'd dig in deeper into its classes to implement nicer animations.
  • Make it more interactive by letting GUI elements slide in and out only when necessary so there's more real estate for the messages.
  • Introduce images and symbols to help with the eye-candyness.

Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoyed this JavaFX example. Let me know your thoughts by using the comment function or by sending me email!

"Walking through the CEC 2007 JavaFX Message Prompter Source" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-10-16 03:44:16.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

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20071012 Friday October 12, 2007

Final CEC Reflections: The Wynn, ZFS Under the Hood, Messaging wrap-up

I'm now back home, sorting through emails and cleaning up some stuff before a regular week of work begins. Here are some highlights from Tuesday and Wednesday during the Sun CEC 2007 conference in Las Vegas:

  • The Wynn: After visiting the CEC Party, Barton, Yan, Henning and I decided to have dinner at the Wynn. It's one of the newest hotels in town and a must-see. This place sure has style! We went to the Daniel Boulud Brasserie which is located inside the hotel at the Lake of Dreams. This is one of the few restaurants in Las Vegas where you can actually eat outside the ever present air-conditioning and enjoy a great view. The lake features a gigantic rectangular waterfall surrounded by a forest. The lake and the waterfall are part of several mini-shows that occur at regular intervals in the afternoon, featuring impressive animatronics such as a  head coming out of the water (with projected animated faces) or a gigantic frog leaning over the waterfall back which also serves as a huge video screen. Music, light and animation are perfectly synchronized so that for instance the head emerging from the water perfectly matches its projected upon face or the light ripples running over the lake perfectly match the animation on screen.
    This is definitely my favourite Vegas hotel now, I wonder where our stock price needs to be to afford having our nect CEC at their convention center :).
  • ZFS Under the Hood: This was a great session done by Jason Bantham and Jarod Nash. They went through the ZFS Source Tour diagram and explained the little boxes one by one while describing the basic processes, mechanisms and data flow that ZFS uses to write and read data. And they were fun speakers too! Plus each attendee that asked a question got a piece of chocolate thrown at as an extra incentive to participate :).
  • Podcasting: After the closing session, Franz, Matthias, Brian, Dave and I recorded episode 3 of the CEC 2007 Podcast. We reflected on our impressions of the conference and on our project to aggregate and display audience messages during the main sessions. Actually, I'm cleaning up and commenting the JavaFX code as we speak to publish it in the next post for your code-reading pleasure :).

"Final CEC Reflections: The Wynn, ZFS Under the Hood, Messaging wrap-up" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-10-12 06:33:24.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

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20070906 Thursday September 06, 2007

7 Easy Tips for ZFS Starters

So you're now curious about ZFS. Maybe you read Jonathan's latest blog entry on ZFS or you've followed some other buzz on the Solaris ZFS file system or maybe you saw a friend using it. Now it's time for you to try it out yourself. It's easy and here are seven tips to get you started quickly and effortlessly:

1. Check out what Solaris ZFS can do for you

First, try to compose yourself a picture of what the Solaris ZFS filesystem is, what features it has and how it can work to your advantage. Check out the CSI:Munich video for a fun demo on how Solaris ZFS can turn 12 cheap USB memory sticks into highly available, enterprise-class, robust storage. Of course, what works with USB sticks also works with your own harddisks or any other storage device. Also, there are great ZFS screencasts that show you some more powerful features in an easy to follow way. Finally, there's a nice writeup on "What is ZFS?" at the OpenSolaris ZFS Community's homepage.

2. Read some (easy) documentation

It's easy to configure Solaris ZFS. Really. You just need to know two commands: zpool (1M) and zfs (1M). That's it. So, get your hands onto a Solaris system (or download and install it for free) and take a look at those manpages. If you still want more, then there's of course the ZFS Administration Guide with detailed planning, configuration and troubleshooting steps. If you want to learn even more, check out the OpenSolaris ZFS Community Links page. German-speaking readers are invited to read my german white paper on ZFS or listen to episode #006 of the POFACS podcast.

3. Dive into the pool

Solaris ZFS manages your storage devices in pools. Pools are a convenient way of abstracting storage hardware and turning it into a repository of blocks to store your data in. Each pool takes a number of devices and applies an availability scheme (or none) to it. Pools can then be easily expanded by adding more disks to them. Use pools to manage your hardware and its availability properties. You could create a mirrored pool for data that should be protected against disk failure and that needs fast access to hardware. Then, you could add another pool using RAID-Z (which is similar, but better than RAID-5) for data that needs to be protected but where performance is not the first priority. For scratch, test or demo data, a pool without any RAID scheme is ok, too. Pools are easily created:

zpool create mypool mirror c0d0 c1d0

Will create a mirror out of the two disk devices c0d0 and c1d0. Similarly, you can easily create a RAID-Z pool by saying:

zpool create mypool raidz c0d0 c1d0 c2d0

The easiest way to turn a disk into a pool is:

zpool create mypool c0d0

It's that easy. All the complexity of finding, sanity-checking, labeling, formatting and managing disks is hidden behind this simple command.

If you don't have any spare disks to try this out with, then you can just create yourself some files, then use them as if they were block devices:

# mkfile 128m /export/stuff/disk1
# mkfile 128m /export/stuff/disk2
# zpool create testpool mirror /export/stuff/disk1 /export/stuff/disk2
# zpool status testpool
pool: testpool
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
testpool ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
/export/stuff/disk1 ONLINE 0 0 0
/export/stuff/disk2 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

The cool thing about this procedure is that you can create as many virtual disks as you like and then test ZFS's features such as data integrity, self-healing, hot spares, RAID-Z and RAID-Z2 etc. without having to find any free disks.

When creating a pool for production data, think about redundancy. There are three basic properties to storage: availability, performance and space. And it's a good idea to prioritize them in that order: Make sure you have redundancy (mirroring, RAID-Z, RAID-Z2) so ZFS can self-heal data when stuff goes wrong at the hardware level. Then decide how much performance you want. Generally, mirroring is faster and more flexible than RAID-Z/Z2, especially if the pool is degraded and ZFS needs to reconstruct data. Space is the cheapest of all three, so don't be greedy and try to give priority to the other two. Richard Elling has some great recommendations on RAID, space and MTTDL. Roch has also posted a great article on mirroring vs. RAID-Z.

4. The power to give

Once you have set up your basic pool, you can already access your new ZFS file system: Your pool has been automatically mounted for you in the root directory. If you followed the examples above, then you can just cd to /mypool and start using ZFS!

But there's more: Creating additional ZFS file systems that use your pool's resources is very easy, just say something like:

zfs create mypool/home
zfs create mypool/home/johndoe
zfs create mypool/home/janedoe

Each of these commands only takes seconds to complete and every time you will get a full new file system, already set up and mounted for you to start using it immediately. Notice that you can manage your ZFS filesystems hierarchically as seen above. Use pools to manage storage properties at the hardware level, use filesystems to present storage to your users and applications. Filesystems have properties (compression, quotas, reservations, etc.) that you can easily administer using zfs set and that are inherited across the hierarchy. Check out Chris Gerhard's blog on more thoughts about file system organization.

5. Snapshot early, snapshot often

ZFS snapshots are quick, easy and cheap. Much cheaper than the horrible experience when you realize that you just deleted a very important file that hasn't been backed up yet! So, use snapshots whenever you can. If you think about whether to snapshot or not, just do it. I recently spent only about $220 on two 320 GB USB disks for my home server to expand my pool with. At these prices, the time you spend thinking about whether to snapshot or not may be more worth than just buying more disk.

Again, Chris has some wisdom on this topic in his ZFS snapshot massacre blog entry. He once had over 60000 snapshots and he's snapshotting filesystems by the minute! Since snapshots in ZFS “just work” and since they only take up the space that actually changes between snapshots, there's really no reason to not doing snapshots all the time. Maybe once per minute is a little bit exaggerated, but once a week, once per day or once an hour per active filesystem is definitely good advice.

Instead of time based snapshotting, Chris came up with the idea to snapshot a file system shared with Samba whenever the Samba user logs in!

6. See the Synergy

ZFS by itself is very powerful. But the full beauty of it can be unleashed by combining ZFS with other great Solaris 10 features. Here are some examples:

  • Tim Foster has written a great SMF service that will snapshot your ZFS filesystems on a regular basis. It's fully automatic, configurable and integrated with SMF in a beautiful way.

  • ZFS can create block devices, too. They are called zvols. Since Nevada build 54, they are fully integrated into the Solaris iSCSI infrastructure. See Ben Rockwood's blog entry on the beauty of iSCSI with ZFS.

  • A couple of people are now elevating this concept even further: Take two Thumpers, create big zvols inside them, export them through iSCSI and mirror over them with ZFS on a server. You'll get a huge, distributed storage subsystem that can be easily exported and imported on a regular network. A poor man's SAN and a powerful shared storage for future HA clusters thanks to ZFS, iSCSI and Thumper! Jörg Möllenkamp is taking this concept a bit further by thinking about ZFS, iSCSI, Thumper and SAM-FS.

  • Check out some cool Sun StorageTek Availability Suite and ZFS demos here.

  • ZFS and boot support is still in the works, but if you're brave, you can try it out with the newer Solaris Nevada distributions on x64 systems. Think about the possibilities together with Solaris Live Upgrade! Create a new boot environment in seconds while not needing to find or dedicate a new partition, thanks to snapshots, while saving most of the needed disk space!

And that's only the beginning. As ZFS becomes more and more adopted, we'll see many more creative uses of ZFS with other Solaris 10 technologies and other OSes.

7. Beam me up, ZFS!

One of the most amazing features of ZFS is zfs send/receive. zfs send will turn a ZFS filesystem into a bitstream that you can save to a file, pipe through bzip2 for compression or send through ssh to a distant server for archiving or for remote replication through the corresponding zfs receive command. It also supports incremental sending and receiving out of subsequent snapshots through the -i modifier.

This is a powerful feature with a lot of uses:

  • Create your Solaris zone as a ZFS filesystem, complete with applications, configuration, automation scripts, users etc., zfs send | bzip2 >zone_archive.zfs.bz2 it for later use. Then, unpack and create hundreds of cloned zones out of this master copy.

  • Easily migrate ZFS filesystems between pools on the same machine or on distant machines (through ssh) with zfs send/receive.

  • Create a crontab entry that takes a snapshot every minute, then zfs send -i it over ssh to a second machine where it is piped into zfs receive. Tadah! You'll get free, finely-grained, online remote replication of your precious data.

  • Easily create efficient full or incremental backups of home directories (each in their own ZFS filesystems) through ZFS send. Again, you can compress them and treat them like you would, say, treat a tar archive.

See? It is easy, isn't it? I hope this guide helps you find your way around the world of ZFS. If you want more, drop by the OpenSolaris ZFS Community, we have a mailing list/forum where bright and friendly people hang out that will be glad to help you.

"7 Easy Tips for ZFS Starters" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-09-06 11:20:15.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.


20070816 Thursday August 16, 2007

ZFS Snapshot Replication Script

One of the OpenSolaris' ZFS filesystem's greatest features are its snapshots. You can easily create a snapshot by saying zfs create pool/filesystem@snapshot and then replicate that snapshot by saying something like zfs send pool/filesystem@snapshot | zfs receive newpool/some_other_filesystem. So far, so great.

Now let's say you have a nice pool and have been creating snapshots on a regular basis. After a few months, you decide to remodel your pool layout or migrate some of your filesystems over to a new pool for whatever reason. Then, you're facing a lot of those zfs send and receive commands. Especially, if you're like Chris and do snapshots on a per-minute basis. That's why the ZFS community is now waiting for 6421958: A zfs send -r option.

I had to migrate quite a few filesystems and many snapshots (thanks to Tim's excellent ZFS Snapshot SMF Service) lately when I set up a new pool strategy for my home server so I wrote myself a script to do the replication job. Since it may take some time for the send -r feature to be implemented, I turned it into a more generic utility.

Disclaimer: Please be advised that this script has only been tested a couple of times and it is provided to you completely on an "as-is" basis. Please have a look at the script to understand how it works and try it out on some non-risky pools and filesystems before you do real stuff with it. Run a backup before using this script and don't shoot me if something goes wrong.

Ok, what can this script do for you? First of all, check out its -h flag to see what options it provides:

# zfs-replicate -h
usage: zfs-replicate [-h] [-F ] [-n] [-s] [-v]
         [-m [-c "FMRI|pattern[ FMRI|pattern]...]" ]
         source dest

where source and dest is a ZFS filesystem, snapshot or volume.

Options:
-h: Print this help.
-F: Force a rollback of the destination filesystem to the most recent
    snapshot before replicating a snapshot. This is equivalent to the -F
    option of zfs receive.
-n: Don't actually replicate anything, just print what would be done.
    This will only print the next step but nothing dependent on that step
    since it won't actually be executed. For instance, -ns will print the
    snapshot command but not print the subsequent send/receive command as it
    depends on the snapshot actually being taken.
-s: After sending existing snapshots, make a final one and replicate it as well.
    This option requires that the source be a filesystem and not a snapshot.
-m: After sending all snapshots, migrate the source to the dest filesystem by
    unmounting the source filesystem and changing the new filesystem's
    mountpoint to that of the source one. This option includes -s.
-c: A space delimited list of SMF services in quotes to be temporarily disabled
    before unmounting the source, then re-enable after changing the mountpoint
    of the destination. Requires -m.
-v: Be verbose.

Great, let's try it out. Here's a pool with some data and some snapshots as well as another, empty pool:


# zfs list -r piscina
NAME                            USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
piscina                         384M  87.6M    19K  /piscina
piscina/ficheros                384M  87.6M   384M  /piscina/ficheros
piscina/ficheros@instantanea1    17K      -   128M  -
piscina/ficheros@instantanea2    17K      -   256M  -
piscina/ficheros@instantanea3      0      -   384M  -
# zfs list -r lago
NAME   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
lago   105K   472M    18K  /lago

Now, let's copy the ficheros filesystem along with all its snapshots in one go:


# zfs-replicate -v piscina/ficheros lago
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea1 to lago.
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea2 to lago.
(incremental to piscina/ficheros@instantanea1.)
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea3 to lago.
(incremental to piscina/ficheros@instantanea2.)
# zfs list -r lago
NAME                         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
lago                         384M  87.6M    20K  /lago
lago/ficheros                384M  87.6M   384M  /lago/ficheros
lago/ficheros@instantanea1    17K      -   128M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea2    17K      -   256M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea3      0      -   384M  -

It works. And it automatically used incremental snapshots as well to save space, too!

If we now add another snapshot to our original pool piscina and then run zfs-replicate again, it will skip already replicated snapshots and just copy those that are additional:


# zfs snapshot piscina/ficheros@instantanea4 
# zfs-replicate -v piscina/ficheros lago
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea4 to lago.
(incremental to piscina/ficheros@instantanea3.)
# zfs list -r lago
NAME                         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
lago                         384M  87.6M    20K  /lago
lago/ficheros                384M  87.6M   384M  /lago/ficheros
lago/ficheros@instantanea1    17K      -   128M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea2    17K      -   256M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea3      0      -   384M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea4      0      -   384M  -

This is useful because you can now run this script on regularly basis to have one pool automatically backed up to another pool. In fact, the -s option will first make sure all existing snapshots are copied over, then create a new snapshot for you and copy that one over as well, all in one command.

Sometimes, the destination filesystem gets touched, or otherwise acted upon and then zfs receive to it will no longer work. In that case, you can use the -F switch which will force a rollback of the destination filesystem to its latest snapshot and then you'll be back in business.

Finally, another scenario is file system migration: You have a filesystem in one pool and want to migrate it with all it's snapshots to another pool, with minimal downtime. This can be done using the -m option: First copy all existing snapshots while the source file system is still live, then unmount it, create a final snapshot, copy that one over to the destination file system as well, set the destination filesystem's mountpoint to be the same as the source filesystem's one and remount the destination file system. (Please note that the script might appear frozen when unmounting while it's waiting for some open files to be closed, etc.).

If you're worried about some daemons depending on your filesystem's availability (like Samba), you can use the -c option to provide their names. zfs-replicate will then bring down the matching SMF services right before unmounting and restart them automatically after re-mounting the migrated filesystem. Again, you might need to wait until the SMF service is really down (Read: The last Samba connection has closed).

I hope this script is useful to you and again, I assume you know what you're doing and do some testing before using it in production. I'm sure there are still some bugs and shortcomings so please send me email to constantin (dot) gonzalez (at) sun (dot) com or leave a comment and I'll try to make the script better for you.

Many thanks to Chris Gerhard, whose backup script was an inspiration for me in hacking together this utility. Also, many thanks to Tim Foster for some code-review and initial feedback (Sorry, I haven't managed to implement some locking yet...). Let me know when you're in Munich and you'll get some well-deserved beer!

"ZFS Snapshot Replication Script" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-16 13:41:02.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.


20070812 Sunday August 12, 2007

ZFS Interview in the POFACS Podcast (German)

Last week, I've been interviewed by the german podcast POFACS, the podcast for alternative computer systems. Today, the interview went live, so if you happen to understand the german language and want to learn about ZFS while driving to work or while jogging, you're invited to listen to the interview.

I was actually amazed at how long the interview turned out: It's 40 minutes, while recording the piece only felt like 20 minutes or so. The average commute time in germany is about 20 minutes, so this interview will easily cover both ways to and from work. But there's more: This episode of POFACS also introduces you to the NetBSD operating system, the German Unix User Group GUUG. Finally, the guys at POFACS were also so kind to feature the HELDENFunk podcast in a short introductory interview. Thanks!

So with a total playing time if 1 hour and 20 minutes, this episode has you covered for at least two commutes or a couple of jogging runs :).

"ZFS Interview in the POFACS Podcast (German)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-12 10:41:54.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

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20070806 Monday August 06, 2007

New Public Podcast: HELDENFunk (in German)

HELDENFunk IconYou might have heard of systemhelden.com in one of my other posts. This is a german community for system administrators and other heroes of IT that is fun to belong to and that is enjoying a nice growth in popularity.

Today, we added a podcast (sorry, it's in german) to this community called "HELDENFunk". This podcast features stories from the Systemhelden.com community, tech news and other fun stuff. In this first episode, we discuss how the Systemhelden.com website is hosted in a Solaris 10 container on a Sun Fire X4200 server at our ISP Cyberways in Augsburg, then Rolf discusses how you can calculate your CO2 footprint out of your server's wattage and he introduces the Sun EcoTour, which is a mobile blog written by a journalist that rides a bike across Germany. Wolfgang Stief is our special guest, he works at Best Systeme and is in the process of setting up Solaris 10 Zones on a Sun Fire T2000 server for GUUG, the German Unix User's Group. We interview another great podcast called POFACS, the podcast for alternative computer systems and we feature Sun's Magnum Switch and a funny video about blending an Apple iPhone in our news section.

Producing the podcast was great fun. We had great people in our studio (Read: conference room...) and quite a few laughs. Thanks to Marc Baumann, we had great microphones and a mixer to record with. My NI Audio Kontrol 1 audio interface, featured in an earlier blog post, proved to provide excellent recording quality. We used quite a complicated setup to conduct a phone interview over Skype but which turned to work quite well. And again, Marc edited and cut everything very nicely so everything now just sounds great.

We plan to publish a new episode each month, so feel free to let us know what you'd like us to cover and what suggestions you might have. Just write to kontakt at systemhelden dot com.

"New Public Podcast: HELDENFunk (in German)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-06 09:02:12.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.


20070731 Tuesday July 31, 2007

New Year's Resolutions

Yesterday, we've announced good financial results for the last fiscal year 07. Very good financial results. I like working for a profitable company, it makes so many things so much easier.

Tomorrow, I'm going to have a meeting with my managers to discuss what to do next. Since we're early in the new financial year 08, I'm thinking about what to do next. So, here are some new year's priorities for my FY08 at Sun:

  • Web 2.0: I've been talking to customers, partners and Sun people in Germany about Web 2.0 a number of times. Every time, the feedback has been very clear: We want More! So I'm going to do more Web 2.0 related stuff: More blogging, podcasting, perhaps a successor to the now famous ZFS movie, more participation in social networking sites, including del.icio.us, XING and Facebook, more evangelizing and of course more insight into where this journey is headed to.
  • Technology: Sun is all about technology. We create, apply and leverage technology to enable the participation age. (Did you know that we've proclaimed the participation age before Tim O'Reilly published his famous Web 2.0 article?)
    We've seen Niagara changing the rules of processor technology and building the backbone of the web, again, and we've already disclosed some information on Niagara 2. We've seen the Constellation System debut during ISC 2007. You may have noticed that the Sun Ultra 40 Workstation is the best workstation on the planet, and BTW, we're changing the economics of true Video-On-Demand Streaming as well, just to name a few favourite technologies on my list.
    The biggest problem to solve now is: Spreading the word. Let me explain. Whenever I participate in a Sun day (A customer meeting in which Sun people present on new Sun technologies), two effects consistently happen: First, more people than originally planned show up (I once had people join in over a video conference line). Second, the meeting takes much longer than originally anticipated, because customers want to hear so much more about our technologies.
    Since we don't have much money to spend on advertising, sponsoring or other forms of traditional awareness generation, we need to do a lot more of these Sun days, and talk to customers one by one. Is this more difficult and time-consuming? Yes. Does this have a more lasting effect than traditional marketing? You bet. Only by talking to the experts at our customers are we able to verify that what we do is right and make sure our technology meets the people that want/need/develop for/join/use/participate in it. In FY08, I'm going to participate in more Sun days and talk to as many customers about Sun technology as I can.
  • Solaris: This may be a sub-topic of "Technology", but it really is a topic of its own: I use Solaris at home, on my laptop, evangelize it to customers, and it feeds my need as a computer scientist to learn about interesting things every day. In FY08, I'm going to use more new Solaris features at home and at work, write more about it (German readers: Check out this ZFS whitepaper), participate more in the OpenSolaris communities and make sure OpenSolaris gets the attention with developers, customers and partners that it deserves.
All in all, I'm sure FY08 is going to be interesting and fun. FY07 has been the year of technology announcements, FY08 will be the year of seeing them all in action. A year of interesting times.

"New Year's Resolutions" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-07-31 14:17:55.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

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Constantin's Blooog by Constantin Gonzalez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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If you want to contact the author, please send email to constantin (dot) gonzalez (at) sun (dot) com.
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