Kool Aid Served Daily

For someone who develops cutting edge system software, I'm actually a late adopter of technology. I fought GUI mail clients forever (or perhaps it was just Microsoft Exchange I was fighting) - I stayed with elm and mutt long past their shelf lives. (And I still prefer mail spools which can be grepped.) But now I use Thunderbird on every system I own.

I finally broke down and bought VMWare Server. And it was a snap to configure and install Ubuntu (I need a Linux NFSv4 test machine) and Solaris Nevada 77. With the first one, I installed Ubuntu off of a DVD. With the Solaris install, I did it off of an ISO.

And I got to thinking, why do I need to dual boot at all? I've got WinXP and Nevada 77 dual booting, and why waste that additional space for Solaris. And, I already love how ZFS lets me preserve my data across Solaris re-installations. My plan is to nuke the raw Nevada partition and run my home directories straight off of the ZFS pools I have created.

The four disks are totally committed to ZFS. And I'm able to add them one at a time to the VMWare Workstation virtual machine. Until I get to the last one that is!

I just checked, it doesn't seem to be something specific with the 4th drive. I added the 4th drive okay as the 3rd drive in the system, but when I tried to add the 3rd drive as the 4th one in the system, I got the very mysterious "Fatal Application Error: reason unknown (type unknown)".

A quick search on google.com didn't reveal the issue. Perhaps I'll have to rephrase my query. Anyway, more to come as it develops.

I've got a NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT card in my system (branded as XFX GeForce 7950GT). It is fanless and supports Dual DVI. I finally got around to adding a Dell 2005 FPW as my second monitor. And that lasted about 15 minutes.

Installation was a breeze on WinXP. But Half Life 2 Episode 2 would not play. This box is my primary home system and has to be able to be an OpenSolaris development machine as needed and also a gaming rig.

Also, when under moderate load, the Dell 2007 FPW (primary monitor), would shake in the background. Not impressive in the least.

Don't get me wrong - I love this graphics card when playing games. It matches nicely with the Dell 2007 FPW. And it is real quiet, which was a major draw for me. I'm just not going to run dual monitors on it.

We put up a Nevada 75 based copy of our next generation NFS server at OpenSolaris pNFS downloads. The main project page is OpenSolaris Project: NFS version 4.1 pNFS.

The basic premise is that you have a metadata server (MDS) and several data servers (DS). A pNFS client would contact the MDS and be told which DS to use. And as the 'p' in pNFS stands for parallel, the client would then stripe file access to the set of DSes.

The instructions for running the prototype are located at pNFS How To. A couple of us have just gone through those instructions blind, i.e., on our own, just like anyone else following them at home. We will be updating them, but in the mean time, here are some notes:

• The MDS has to be configured before the DS(es).
• As the mdsadm command is not persistent, after you reconfigure each DS on the MDS, you will need to dservadm enable the DS(es).
  • It is probably best to do all of the mdsadm commands first on the MDS.
• The ZFS pools created for this can not be reused after an upgrade to non-pNFS bits.
• The ZFS pools might not be reusable after an upgrade to a newer version of the pNFS prototype.
• You do not need a pool on the MDS.
  • The following sharemgr needs to reference a valid path:

    sharemgr add-share -s <path> <group>

  • You could just do a mkdir /export/pnfs on the MDS and share that.