First Oracle is breaking it’s promise to keep OpenSolaris running.

Then BBC Future Media & Technology is announcing more departments relocated from London to North…

Now I just received sad news that Wesabe is closing down.

So far I see that  IT related stuff is going downhill…

However there are some positive voices coming about the aeronautics …

The I’ve noticed that one pool takes ages to scrub:

state: ONLINE
scrub: scrub in progress for 0h59m, 40.72% done, 1h26m to go

turns out one of the drives is under-performing :

extended device statistics
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b
lofi1     0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
lofi2     0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  3.0    0.0   0 100
lofi3     0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd0       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd1       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd2       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd3     226.0    0.0 28742.7    0.0  1.5  0.8   10.3  63  85
sd4     227.0    0.0 29056.7    0.0 19.0  1.0   88.1 100  99

That’s bad, it’s my only Seagate which survived in the box … looks like I will have to start hunting for cheap 1TB hitachi again …

So far, I love it!

Solaris and OpenSolaris does not include SmartArray drivers, these need to be download from HP Website

After that, extract the .pkg directory onto a USB stick

Then start the LiveCD, open terminal and type :

 pfexec touch /ADD_DRV_IGNORE_ROOT_BASEDIR

after that install the driver :

 pfexec pkgadd -d path/to/pkgdir

Now you can start installation, it should see the array.

I am quite clued on Solaris, thanks to a friend of mine and now thanks to OpenSolaris project I am starting to like it.

Solaris suffers from one big problem … docs.sun.com is not that clear to get through for newbies. However I’ve got an OpenSolaris Bible for my PFY. It looks like more approachable paper version of docs. Handy.

Short trip to a highstreet shop – Maplin and I’ve grabbed a 1TB Hitachi ( I will never buy Seagate again ). I’ve picked up an Air Duster and 12cm fan as well just as I was there. Fan is for my new PC to keep disks cool.

Open the server, loads and loads of dust, Air Duster gets to work ( someone will kill me as it all came out and dispersed in a nice clean living room ). Swapping the drives. Starting the server.

It takes a bit longer for the server to startup as it was not restarted in ages and all timers told it to rescan all systems properly this time.

Starting Solaris … and my volume with missing disk is … OK … weird. Started zfs scrub on it , just to make sure. Finally it found out that it’s missing a copy, volume is degraded. zfs replace and the rebuild starts, tells me it will be an hour to mirror 750GB back on a new drive.

Now this failure got me thinking if I should replace my VM Host , it’s currently OpenSuse 10 with ancient version of Xen.

I’m wondering if I should put an ESX hypervisor or something else. Certainly my experience with ESX is that it’s rubbish at storage management. I am leaning towards OpenSolaris as it has a selection of hypervisors and storage management just proven to be a breeze.

Will see …

SUSS looks good, Only problem I had was with IPv6, donno if it was due to VBox or SUSS but when I’ve set a static IPv6 it was crashing the interface. Other than that, good stuff, will need to test both products more.

Now, after failed play with Nexenta Core and Xen DomU, I decided to have a go at para virtualizing the baptop. After a few kernel versions and config files … it works. Still without console but works. Great!

I really wanna try that Debian on Solaris kernel called Nexenta. Unfortunately it looks that it can’t do DomU and ZFS_ROOT at the same time. I have filled a bug report with Nexenta.

Having a network attached storage is a briliant idea. I am staying with it. It’s just the Media Vault product.

Slow death. After half a year, a small fan has broken and since then it became loud, I have contacted HP to get it replaced, but they asked me to ship the whole unit to them, even when I was perfectly fine to replace it my self. I said ˇNo, thank you˝. That was my first experience with HP Support for dummies (home user). Months later, I have moved to a new place with a dedicated computer closet and I bought a proper server, the ML110. From there, I started experimenting with OpenSolaris, which with ZFS and NFS – SMB sharing, it’s soo much better and extremely flexible solution.

Two 750GB drives later I have my first Sol(aris)NAS. Very nice creature and actually faster than the MV. Last week I started migrating data on to the SolNas, and today I’ve finished migrating clients to it. Nice!

MV is switched off, my energy consumption lost a 35W sucker and I have no idea what to do with it now. Just gonna leave it where it is. Maybe you want it ?

For some thoughts about the second type, read more

The most popular are Nagios and MRTG. Nagios is usually for alerting while MRTG based on RRD tools is used for plotting SNMP data.

I can understand why Nagios is so popular, it is just great, does its job beautifully. Configuring Nagios is also just a breeze and what really takes time is putting your requirements down, configurations is very easy to understand and can be arranged in many ways so you can choose the most convenient way for you. In my case configuring it for multiple systems was just a matter of using sed to replace hosts name and IP address and redirect it to a new file. When using web interface constantly host groups and service groups are extremely useful to arrange data on the screen. Plugins system is very useful as well. You can write your own plugin in any language or you can download from free repository.

For plotting … MRTG is not my best choice. I have some experience with it when I have been using it to monitor bandwidth usage on my ASDL connection, also we are using it to monitor load on our servers. When I was setting it up it wasn’t clear … some randomness all around me. Configuration file is just amazingly cluttered, navigating is only possibly with search function build into your text editor. Not really admin friendly.
Because MRTG was so annoying to setup I went on a safari to pickup some better tool for that job and I have found a real beauty ( Really!, even graphs look nicer ). It is Munin.

Munin is great, it has agent-server architecture. That approach helps a lot in diverse networks. You can have multiple agents monitored by multiple servers. You can have server with agents deployed in different parts of your network and monitoring equipment not accessible from server.

Agents can monitor not only host which they are residing on, but SNMP anable devices as well. Munin calls agents nodes. Configuring node is literally symlinking between plugins repository and plugin configuration folder, some plugins require to run as a specific user or group, not problem add it to very clean nodes config file, you can pass environmental variables that way as well. Did I mention that it uses plugins ? Which you can easily write yourself in any language?

Server is the place where all the data are collected from agents and plotted. This part of Munin is easy to configure as well. It even allows you to group your nodes in domains, put multiple sources into one graph and feature which I didn’t employed yet … it allows you to setups alarms and it works very good with Nagios.

From my perspective, winning team is Nagios + Munin. Both suited for their job , expandable with simple plugins, plus they can cooperate. Worth trying at least.