Zfs on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

State of the Nerd: Pens, Homelab, Docker/Rancher, Intel NUC

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 07:43:26 -0400

This is just a quick check-in round to cover an assortment of subjects.

Fountain Pens

Last time I checked in, I let you in on my dirty little secret about loving cheap fountain pens. Well, that was so much fun that I went ahead and set up a new blog just to focus on great values in analog writing tools (especially fountain pens, inks, and paper). Enter: Chronicles of a Cheap Geezer.

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.

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.