Why do we information workers have to sit all day? Sitting during conference calls, sitting during meetings, sitting and typing, why, why, why? Couldn't I stand for a while? How about chatting while walking, would that be acceptable?

Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic's NEAT Lab asked these same questions, and came up with a great answer. A treadmill for your office. Check out the USAtoday article and the article on Squidoo. This is such a great idea.

 Now wouldn't it be great to combine this idea and a SunRay? Then you could be walking on your treadmill, or strolling through a hall way and when you needed to work or type, just plug in your badge and have your computer session up and running. That would be totally slick.

Now how do I convince Sun that I should have one of these in my office? I'll have to start with my boss. 

The next installment in our ongoing series of interviews is now live on OpenSolaris. The interview I did with Amit Vashi covers why Qlogic is participating in the OpenSolaris Storage Community and where they are finding value.

May 2008

Interview with Amit Vashi, Vice President, Qlogic

audio

http://qlogic.com

Things have been crazy over the past few weeks. There have been so many wonderful things going on (like Community 1 and the OpenSolaris 2008.05 launch) and I've been so busy I have neglected my blog and audience.

Many of you took some time to watch the video of my experience building a home NAS box. If you are interested in such things I would highly recommend taking a look at Simon Breden's blog on his experience. Not only does he cover the configuration, but also the rational on why he chose his hardware and ZFS.

Speaking of ZFS, I would like to publicly congratulate the ZFS boot/ install team for their recent putback of the ZFS boot project. Lori, George, Eric, Mark, Lin, Eric and others put in well over 10,000 hours of effort (much of which was in the last 5 months) to make this project a reality. Back in build 88 the ZFS boot project was putback and this enable SPARC systems to use ZFS as the root file system. Then just this morning the install portion was putback into build 90. Again this putback enables systems to be installed with the legacy installer and use the features like LiveUpgrade and JumpStart for installation. The ZFS boot page has an FAQ and other useful documents on this project. Way to go team!!!

 

April was an exciting month for the OpenSolaris storage community. We updated the community web site with new pages and saw a large increase in web page views. We also approved a new project and other projects made good progress. We also interview 2 community members.

View all of the updates on the April What's Happening page ... and if you have more news, please update the wiki page.

Deirdre just posted some great videos from the OpenSolaris developer summit. This was a great weekend and it was fun getting to see the faces behind the messages on opensolaris-discuss.

Thanks for the great videos Deirdre!


 

Thanks Jesse for the great graphic for the upcoming developer summit. 

If you are interested in OpenSolaris storage and the latest happening, stop by our chat on Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately our 11 year old mascot will not be there, but I can bring autographed pictures.
 

Today we are kicking off a new part of the OpenSolaris Storage Community. -- the Community Spotlight. The community spotlight is a place where we will feature the contributions and successes of OpenSolaris Storage.

Checkout out our first 2 interviews:

	Interview with Evan Powell, CEO Nexenta	http://nexenta.org
	Interview with Gregory Perry, CEO Liveammo	http://liveammo.com

Do you have a story to tell? I would be interested in hearing it...

21 mins.

Also available in iPod video format

My thanks to all who helped make this possible! 

Chase: You did an awesome job buddy! I'm so proud of you/ You took a huge step of faith to do this video and you did great. It is kinda weird to see yourself on video, but it is way cool. Great job, my friend!

Thanks to Paul, Damon, Lynn and Deirdre for all of their help making this video and the previous write up possible. "None of us is as smart as all of us." - Ken Blanchard

[NOTE: I'm reposting this entry to correct the mp4 version of the file. The original file disappeared some time yesterday. Sorry for any who tried to d/l and received a 404. --jc]

Over the winter break, my son and I spent some quality time together and we created a little home NAS server. We had a great time and we both learned a lot. I learned how much I love OpenSolaris (and how little I know about Windows) and my son got a glimpse of what I do at work. I had forgotten how important it is for 11 year olds to know what their dads do. My son also learned a little about computer hardware and how to use a UNIX command line.

This post details what we did to get our NAS box up and running as well as some of the challenges we faced.

What's the Problem?

We took on this challenge primarily as a learning experience, but we also wanted to solve a real problem. We have a few Windows XP machines at home and there is always some type of contention with the music and homework stored on one of the machines. Typically, the contention is that I'm working at home (on my OpenSolaris laptop) using the monitor attached to the “primary” Windows machine and the rest of the family is trying to use the Windows laptop to listen to music or get a homework file. A while back, I created a Windows Share on the “primary” desktop, but firewalls and other problems kept making the share go away. So, I decided that with the new CIFS server in OpenSolaris, it was a great time to use ZFS and CIFS to create a home NAS box and replace the Windows share machine.

Step 1: Getting the Hardware

To get started, I had to find hardware for the NAS box. The good thing about working for Sun is that there is always old hardware lying around. When I entered our lab, I quickly found a stack of unused multipacks. While they were pretty old and unexciting (6 x 40GB drives), they would provide a great way to use ZFS and I didn't need much storage, yet. The other thing I found was a recently retired W2100Z workstation. This is a great platform with dual 64-bit AMD processors, an internal SCSI drive, and a place to put 3 more drives. I also found some DIMMs for the W2100Z and an extra SCSI card. Sweet! This was everything we needed to get started.

Step 2: Assembling the Hardware

Since my son had never seen the inside of a computer, we started by opening up the W2100Z case and walking through the hardware components. “Here's a CPU, there's a controller, that's the power supply”... stuff like that. Also, I did a quick lesson about static electricity. There is a lot of static in January in Colorado , so I showed him how to “attach” himself to the computer with a static strip and get started with the hardware upgrade.

I explained we needed the SCSI card to attach to the multipack. I also explained that the extra memory would be used to help ZFS work better. The whole lesson and hardware installation took only 20 minutes. Then, it was time to install OpenSolaris.

Step 3: Installing OpenSolaris SXDE 1/08

Preparing to install OpenSolaris was quite simple and quick (5 minutes with explanations):

• Download and burn DVD

• Insert the DVD

• Boot the workstation

• Answer the questions

• Click the “ Finish” button
  
  

Then came the actual installation. My son didn't this part of the project, because he had to go to bed before it finished. The install took about 1.5 hours and our new server was up and running OpenSolaris when my son woke up the next morning. Now all we had to do was configure everything.

Step 4: Configuring OpenSolaris

I always try to be a good dad and teach my children the lessons that took me a while to learn. One of those lessons is that there are smart people who can be helpful to you, and you should build on their knowledge whenever possible. For this project, the smart people were the developers of the OpenSolaris CIFS server and ZFS features. The distillation of their knowledge is found in the CIFS Getting Started Guide. This guide was invaluable and provided us everything we needed to get started. So, I suggest you also start with this guide as well.

Create the Users

To begin with, we needed to create a few different users. At install time, we created our root user account and after this we needed to have a “privileged” regular user and a user that could own the files. We selected the userids admin and media for these purposes. To add the users, we used the “Users and Groups” action on the Administration section of the Start Menu.

Create a Storage Pool

To get our server up and serving data, we needed to configure the storage. To do this, we used the ZFS GUI by just pointing a browser to https://<hostname>:6789/zfs and logging in as a user with root permissions. This graphical interface provides the ability to see all of the storage attached to your system and how it is being used. We selected all of the drives on the multipack and created a single RAIDZ1 pool called mediapool.

Create the File Systems

After creating a ZFS pool with the ZFS GUI, we switched to a terminal window to check the status of the newly created pool:

# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
mediapool 144K 165G 29.9K /mediapool
  

Then, we created the file systems:

# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed mediapool/music
# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed mediapool/photos
# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed mediapool/movies
  

We decided to set the ZFS property casesensitivity=mixed to allow us to use mixed cases for the files. This is a very important step when sharing files with Windows. If you don't do this, all of the file names will get set to all upper case, which is very hard to read.

Configure CIFS

After creating the file systems, we started the CIFS service:

# svcadm enable -r smb/server
# smbadm join -w CENTRAL
  

Since we were working on our home systems and didn't have a fancy domain controller, we used the workgroup mode for sharing the files. I had previously set our home workgroup to CENTRAL, which is reflected in the join command. In most cases. you would keep the workgroup set to WORKGROUP.

Set Up Authentication

We also needed to update the OpenSolaris password system to configure the CIFS server to use PAM (pluggable authentication module) authentication. We did this using the following mystical command:

# echo "other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn" >> /etc/pam.conf
  

Additionally, after entering the above command, we had to reset the passwords for all users who would be using the CIFS authentication. For our situation, it was only one user:

# passwd media
  

That did the trick and we were ready to start sharing the file systems we created.

Share File Systems

We were getting closer to being able to use our new server. CIFS was enabled, the file systems were created, and we just needed to get them shared:

# zfs set sharesmb=name=Movies mediapool/movies
# zfs set sharesmb=name=Music mediapool/music
# zfs set sharesmb=name=photos mediapool/photos
  

We could have used a single set command with the sharesmb=on option, but we wanted useful names on our Windows' machines. So, to avoid any ambiguous or long share names, we explicitly set them. This was just one more of the little tricks and helpful tips from the CIFS Getting Started Guide and the discussion forums.

Set File System Permissions

For our last step, all of the files needed to be owned by our primary share user:

# chown -R media /mediapool
  

After this last step, we were done configuring OpenSolaris on our NAS box.

Step 5: Configuring Windows

Now, the real fun began. So far, it took only 2 hours to assemble the server hardware, install the OS, and configure the storage, and 90 minutes of that was the OpenSolaris installation. We were feeling pretty good about spending only 30 minutes to get our file system configured and shared. Then, we had to configure Windows.

I realized very quickly that while using a Windows XP system for e-mail and web browsing is pretty simple, there is some complexity in sharing files. I scoured web sites and discussion forums and learned that sharing files with CIFS is different than sharing file with NFS.

I'm used to having a filer export an NFS file system, which provides the ability to browse the share and then verify the permissions. Well, Windows is the same, but the permissions thing is different. Or, so I thought.

When mounting a CIFS share from a OpenSolaris box, you must authenticate to that server. This point is critical. The authentication also has to be from the perspective of the server and not the client.

To make the share on the windows client work, we needed to do the following:

1. Map a windows drive with the “Folder” path of \\< OpenSolaris_Server >\<sharename>

2. Select the Connect as different user name link and use the user name and password from the OpenSolaris server.

For our machine, the “Folder” path was \\PHRED\\Movies and the user name was media.

Making this simple discovery took about 3 days, but we finally had a way for all of our Windows machines to access a shared file system on our new OpenSolaris NAS box.

Variations on a Theme

My son and I had a great time with this exercise. We had a lot of fun playing with the hardware and we both learned a great deal. We are still playing with the server and are now looking at adding some new pieces:

• Larger drives – we'll be adding some 500GB SATA drives, using the onboard SATA controller

• Virus scanning – we're looking into using clamAV to do our onboard virus scanning. The directions on the Genunix wiki look pretty straight forward.

Thanks and References

This post would not be complete with out us taking the time to thank those who helped us out along the way. Here are a list of web sites, blogs, and discussion lists that were invaluable.

• http://opensolaris-DOT-org/os/project/cifs-server/

• http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Getting_Started_With_the_Solaris_CIFS_Service

• http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Solaris_CIFS_Service_Troubleshooting

• http://blogs.sun.com/dougm/

• storage-discuss-AT-opensolaris.org

• cifs-discuss-AT-opensolaris.org

Also, thanks to those who blazed the trail before us.

There is a great article over at  discussing the various file system choices in Solaris 10. The first paragraph of the article is below and sets the tone for the rest of the article:

Solaris Filesystem Choices

posted by John Finigan on Mon 21st Apr 2008 19:00 UTC

When it comes to dealing with storage, Solaris 10 provides admins with more choices than any other operating system. Right out of the box, it offers two filesystems, two volume managers, an iscsi target and initiator, and, naturally, an NFS server. Add a couple of Sun packages and you have volume replication, a cluster filesystem, and a hierarchical storage manager. Trust your data to the still-in-development features found in OpenSolaris, and you can have a fibre channel target and an in-kernel CIFS server, among other things. True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package.

 It is great to see such a great article showing up on OSNews. Well done John and thanks OSNews!

To complete the picture I think it would be important to highlight the other file systems that are being worked as part of OpenSolaris. These projects can all be found at the Storage Community projects page. Some of the file system work that should be noted include:

• Squashfs
• JFS: Journaled File System
• Ext3 file system support
• Fuse on Solaris
• and ZFS on disk encryption support

There is a growing excitement around storage and OpenSolaris, and these projects are a great expression of this energy.

How does OpenSolaris and open source play a roll in your storage solutions? Does it help or is it creating problems? Let me know I'm interested in hearing ...

Jim Hughes  just posted a great video of how well data contained in ZFS survives physical destruction. Jim Walker also posted a few pictures to remember the event.

It is scary and fun to see what happens when engineers are give big hammers.

Thanks for the great demo guys!

PS: if you get a chance, Jim Hughes will be presenting at CommuniytOne, May 5th, it will be a great time. 

This evening I was working on the redesign of the OpenSolaris Storage Community web site. Thanks to Paul, Deirdre (a belated welcome to the Sun clan Deirdre!) and others the new pages are really coming along. Thanks guys! But I have a short attention span and was wondering how to create a custom blog feed for all of the "interesting" storage blogs. In my searching I stopped at my Google Reader page and noticed it had been a while since I last read ANYTHING. ... ooohh something new to look at ...

I read about Claire and her decision to Seize the day. And I read 3 entries from my meteorology friend about National Poetry Month. During my schooling I hated poetry. I never understood it and I never could memorize anything. It was not until graduate school that I learned that you don't have to memorize poetry and that just listening can be very inspiring. Letting my mind drift to another place caught in the rhyme of someone else's words sounds very appealing. I think I'll be following Dave's blog this month and suggest that the kids might want to read the poems to their dear ol dad. Hopefully they can find the joy in these words earlier in life and I.

Well back to web sites and RSS readers ....

We all have those moments in life when we just feel a bit ... wired, or awkward. For me, this is typically when I try something new and in front of other people. Sometimes we feel strange when we hear our recorded voice for the first time. The below video represents one of those awkward moments for me. My on-line video debut is the introduction from a recent Birds of a Feather session at the USENIX FAST conference. This was a great time of sharing the vision we have for the OpenSolaris Storage community and hearing what people are wanting from OpenSolaris.

Sit back and laugh as much as I did ... it's only 11 minutes.

For those interested in more videos of Jeff, you can tune in tonight as my son and I present our HomeNAS project. We will be presenting at the Front Range OpenSolaris user group meeting at 6:30pm.

[UPDATE: The video for the HomeNAS: So Simple a 5th Grader can do it, is now live. ]