Openindiana on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

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.

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.