Smartos on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

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.

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.

Meet the SmartOS Community

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:23:19 -0400

While hanging out in some of the regular channels for SmartOS help, I’ve noticed that some people may still be having a hard time finding where the community congregates. I know this is already documented in the SmartOS Wiki, but the Wiki is not yet as easy to navigate as it maybe could be.

Still, if you go there, the first thing you’ll find today is “Where to Find Us”. Pretty hard to miss.

Update

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:25:11 -0400

It’s good to see other people out there are reading this blog and trying SmartOS for themselves with some success.

I’ve been talking to some of the fine folks at Joyent to start contributing back to this project. Some of the framework of a more mature project just isn’t there yet, but things are coming together. I filed my paperwork with them to join the project, and right now I’m trying to work out how to get more involved in packaging.

Thank you.

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:49:30 -0400

I started this blog less than a week ago, and I wrote a niche article about SmartOS that I expected to get a few dozen views on over a period of days or weeks. It’s been a little over a full day, and I definitely got a lot more eyes on it than I was expecting. Thank you all so much! This really tells me that there is an interest out there in better SmartOS content. I heard you, and I’m planning on answering that.

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.