Omnios 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.

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.