I have been very gung-ho about OpenSolaris in the past. There are some fantastic technologies in it. Unfortunately, when Oracle bought Sun they essentially killed the openness of OpenSolaris. There are so many who believed in it and the code was mostly open source. Now we have something new. Let’s see how OpenIndiana goes....
Storage
Great article about using ZFS for a home NAS
The following post is from someone who has used ZFS on his home fileserver for a year. It is very well-written and I recommend it to anyone considering doing this. http://breden.org.uk/2009/05/01/home-fileserver-a-year-in-zfs/ Click here for a listing of all his posts on ZFS
Apple has a great sense of humor
Due to a power failure, my NAS device was powered down. When the connection failed, the icon used to represent the NAS changed. Normally it looks like a rack-mounted XServe, but when the connection was lost it showed up as an old-school CRT monitor with a Windows blue screen of death (BSOD). Here’s a...
Automatic email alerting of zpool problems and weekly zpool scrub
Since I’m using consumer drives that are prone to failure (one already failed within 2 days, but ZFS prevented any data loss). I am using the script located here: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/scripts/submittedScripts/zpadmin.txt. This will script allows for regular monitoring and scrubs of the pool with email alerting. These next bunch of steps may not be necessary...
Using MDNS to advertise OpenSolaris NAS to Mac computers
This step is not necessary, but it seems like a good idea if you have Mac computers. Create the XML files that tell MDNS what to advertise. (Found this information from here, here, and here. Create /etc/avahi/services/smb.service with the following content: <?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*--> <!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd"> <service-group> <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name> <service> <type>_device-info._tcp</type> <port>548</port>...
Setting up a home NAS using OpenSolaris and ZFS
I got my inspiration for this project from reading the following posts on Adam Retter’s blog: In need of Open Storage Choosing Software and Hardware for my DIY NAS Building my DIY NAS I particularly liked that he made every attempt to make the NAS energy efficient. The hardware he chose made sense, so...