Illumos on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

Homelab Ketchup

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 19:18:07 -0400

I’ve been busy busy busy geeking out in my homelab. Where did we leave off? Oh, yeah, I set up that Jenkins server.

I’ve been pretty busy since then.

Set up a server outside of my house to act as an OmniOS package repository.
After watching from the sidelines for years, I felt it was time to start taking Bitcoin seriously. I’ve been buying BTC, spending it, learning how it works.
Set up a Bitcoin full node inside of a kvm zone on one of my OmniOS servers. I threw a lot of resources at it while it downloaded the blockchain, which finished overnight. Then I scaled it down and it’s running in a small VM on a big machine.
bitcoind was making lots of little synchronous writes to my ZFS pool so I added an SSD. ~10GB for a slog, the remainder for L2ARC. It’s kind of neat to watch the writes queue up on the SSD and then flush out all at once (every several seconds) to the magnetic disks.
I’ve got a Jenkins job that builds and publishes packages of Git for OmniOS. But I’ve learned enough about CI to know that I want to do this a better (smarter) way, so I’m holding off on making my package repo public until I feel a lot better about what I’m building and how I’m building it.
I’ve got my kids’ Minecraft server running in an OmniOS zone, complete with an SMF manifest. I have great customer acceptance on this story.
I’m also building Tor on OmniOS but I haven’t taken the time to work up the SMF manifest yet. Also, I want to wrap some more scripting around the decision to build or not build based on Git commit tags.
I installed a PDU in the cabinet, but it was an awful experience and I’m ashamed of the final outcome. The tl;dr is that this specific PDU was never meant to be mounted in this specific cabinet.

Once I get the Tor packages building to my liking and I can get them published out, I have a series of articles that I’d like to write about using OmniOS as a platform for hosting Tor hidden services. Now that Freedom Hosting is gone. The raid on that hosting service has had a chilling effect on people who need an online presence under the safety of anonymity. SmartOS or even SDC might be even better for this purpose, but I need to get my hands on some more hardware to prove it out.

fruits of insomnia

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 07:56:48 -0400

One of the common struggles that goes with being autistic is maintaining a regular sleep schedule. For a lot of us, it just doesn’t happen. Last night was a rough night, in which I did get a lot of sleep, but it was at the wrong time: 6PM to 1:30AM. After getting a full night’s sleep, I was ready to kick some ass. What to do?

I know! I’ll start working on my Jenkins CI server!

devices have different sector alignment

Sat, 27 Jun 2015 16:40:55 -0400

[root@dogface ~]# zpool replace zones /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2072AB3D4d0 /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2B66D775Ed0 cannot replace /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2072AB3D4d0 with /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2B66D775Ed0: devices have different sector alignment

And that’s where things went wrong.

Oh, it all started as a really great weekend to be in the homelab. Four new Western Digital Red WD60EFRX 6TB disks had arrived, and I was ready to replace my four 2TB disks with them. I’d replaced the first two of four disks without a hitch. They were Western Digital Red WD2002FAEX 2TB disks. I’d been assuming for some time that I had four identical disks in this zpool, but forgot the compromise that I’d made way back when I first set this machine up: I’d used two Red disks and two Black disks (Western Digital Black WD2002FAEX 2TB). So when I tried to replace disk #3 of 4 in my zpool, things didn’t go as smoothly. devices have different sector alignment

illumos makes a comeback in the homelab

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 23:09:10 -0400

Up until a couple of years ago, I was becoming increasingly active in the illumos community. I’d given a talk on the subject at Triangle DevOps, and indeed my most popular entries on this blog tend to be the ones relating to SmartOS. But something happend in my professional career, a conflict of interests, that compelled me to pull back from that community for awhile. The conflict is now gone, and hot on the heels of illumos Day 2014, my interest is re-invigorated.

women in open source: revisited

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 07:29:54 -0400

The other day, I posted some thoughts capturing a conversation that happened in the illumos community over the weekend. If you missed it, head over first to The illumos Number That Bothers Me.

The conversation can’t die there. We’ve got to take pro-active steps to better understand how we got into this gender monoculture in the first place, and be catalysts to the change we wish to see in our community. I’ve been looking around a bit since then and found a few resources that should hopefully help to get the ball rolling.

the illumos number that bothers me (and what we need to do about it)

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 07:44:15 -0400

I just got back late last night from Surge 2014 and illumos Day, which immediately followed Surge the next day. There were some great talks going on, which I’m sure I’ll also be writing about. But the first speaker in particular dropped something on me that’s bothering me, and it should bother pretty much anyone that hears it.

Garrett D’Amore, founder of the illumos project, crawled through all of the commits and made a really interesting discovery. This is a four year old project, and remains relatively obscure (though some very visible things have come out of it, like zfs). In those four years, about 150 unique contributors have committed code into illumos-gate, the shared core of the illumos ecosystem that distributions are built on. Now on the surface, this number sounds pretty wicked cool. illumos is a fairly unknown project, sadly, so to score commits from 150 engineers sounds like a really good thing. Or is it?

Quick Tip: Netatalk 3.0.1 on Joyent SmartOS

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:52:54 -0400

I had to fiddle around with this a bit and thought it might be useful to others. I’m using a Joyent SmartOS zone as a file server for my Macs at home, and Netatalk is really the best way to share files to a Mac from a UNIX system.

Real quick, here’s how it was done:

download netatalk source, untar the source, cd into the source directory
./configure --with-bdb=/opt/local --with-init-style=solaris --without-pam --prefix=/opt/local
vim distrib/initscripts/Makefile
find the line that begins with “servicedir” and change it to:
servicedir = /var/svc/manifest/network/
save & exit the makefile
make && sudo make install
vim /opt/local/etc/afp.conf and add your shares
sudo svcadm enable netatalk
verify that it’s running with: svcs netatalk

Special thanks to rmustacc in Freenode/#illumos for helping me get the SMF manifest installing to the correct path. I hope some of you find this helpful.

Introduction to illumos - Oct 17, 2012 - Raleigh, NC

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 23:39:11 -0400

I will be speaking Wednesday night at the Triangle DevOps group’s October meeting, hosted by WebAssign. The topic is “Introduction to illumos”. I’m expecting this to be a gentle introduction to the illumos world for a target audience of Linux users. We’re going to talk a little bit about what illumos is (and what it isn’t), some of the benefits of using illumos that set it apart from Linux, some of the popular distributions (OpenIndiana, OmniTI’s OmniOS, Joyent’s SmartOS), and a few of the gotchas that I’ve run into with my own path of discovery on this platform.

bonnie++ on on Frankenbox vs. HP Proliant N40L

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 20:18:46 -0400

I’ve got a few OpenIndiana boxes kicking around at the house, and I got to thinking that maybe my rather modern HP Proliant N40L with mirrored Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB disks and 8GB of RAM wasn’t all that speedy.

So I installed bonnie++ from the package repository and decided to see how the N40L, dogface, measures up against tuna, an old frankencomputer that I built from parts sourced from many places over many years.

Radio Silence

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:37:23 -0400

Back in March, I accepted a position with Wireless Generation. I’m doing some great things that will help students to reach more of their full potential. I’m very proud of what I do, but I can’t exactly write about it.

This has also, more or less, deferred my work in Illumos.

Know that I’ve not lost interest in blogging about techie things. It’s just that most of the techie things that I’m working on are potentially confidential, so I’ll have to stay mum on it.

Discovering SmartOS

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:50:38 -0400

As I’ve alluded to previously, I’ve been exploring Joyent’s SmartOS lately. I’d like to talk a little bit more about it. It seems to me that a lot of my peers haven’t yet heard about it, or don’t really understand it much at all. The documentation isn’t really there yet, so I think that it is a little hard to get the right first impression if you’re coming into it with no Solaris background.