c0t0d0s0.org - Solaris

New features of Opensolaris 2008.11

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:11:13 +0100

There is a great list of all the new features of Opensolaris 2008.11 at the opensolaris.com website: What's New in OpenSolaris 2008.11?

Opensolaris 2008.11

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:41:31 +0100

The released version of Opensolaris 2008.11 is available at the usual locations for download. It contains several interesting new developments like the Time Slider, Fast Reboot and many many more new features ...

NAS at home

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:40:39 +0100

While preparing the next part for the configuration walkthrough of the Sun 7000 my mind was playing with an desire: I want this interface on an soho device. I played around with many NAS boxes but there wasn´t a single interface in the class of the Fishworks interface. Intel Atoms are cheap enough to build real soho NAS devices from it ...

About migrations

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:14:36 +0100

This is a trend i´ve recognizing for a while now: Companies stopped to migrate to Linux for the migrations sake. I think it´s a combination of Solaris 10 (as i wrote several time: the tenth version rescued the Solaris franchise), the consequence of several burned fingers with Linux and some people that doesn´t take this "Linux is cheaper" meme for granted and use their own pencil and calculator.

The Computerworld writes about this tendency in Replacing high-end Unix with enterprise Linux? Not so fast:

As Qualcomm's director of IT, Matthew Clark was part of the team that reviewed the Linux option. The company's ratio of administrators to users is currently 500-to-1 (although he plans to lower that to about 450-to-1). "With Linux, it would have been 150- or 175-to-1. We would have had to hire three additional administrators for every administrator we have right now working on Unix," Clark says.

Another Solaris user states in the same article:

"We won't be as aggressive in replatforming to Linux as we initially thought," he says. But, he adds, "we feel that both platforms will have a place in our infrastructure."

A really interesting read.

About all this "What Sun should do?" articles

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:05:10 +0100

I´ve thought about linking to all this people writing articles about "What Sun should do now?". But at the end most of this articles are written with no background knowledge or with an hidden agenda. So i simply decided not to link to this articles at all.

But there is an article i want to comment. Rich Sharples writes in What Sun Should Do:

#3 Solaris
See above. Linux has won. Whatever technical merit Solaris has today will be commoditized next year. The innovation around Linux is relentless.

Next year ... really? ZFS is available for years now. I don´t see it´s commoditization by any technology in Linux at the moment. Same thing for DTrace. No SSD support besides of simply using it as a faster disk.

And i know, all those Linux people will cry "Foul" but i do not really see innovation in the Linux kernel. Having many hardware drivers in the kernel isn´t an innovation. Commoditization and innovation are diametral concepts. Linux is good in commoditization, it´s the master in the field of good enough. But it fails in the field of innovating. And to get interesting technologies (besides of drivers) Linux need strong competitors. We don´t stand still. There are other interesting technologies in their creation that will gives us a good technological lead.

By the way. To understand Mr. Sharples standpoint you should know, that he is "Director, Product Management at Red Hat". What a strange luck that he suggests to drop products that could hurt his employer. I tend to say this is a kind of hidden agenda.

From my perspective, Sun has just to learn one thing: Learning to kick the butts of our competitors with their good enough products and learning to make more money from our innovations. But: You don´t make money by dropping them.

Erweiterte "Solaris 10 Security" Präsentation

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:40:13 +0100

Für die Immersion Week habe ich meine Security-Präsentation ein wenig aufgewertet und erweitert. Hier ist die neue Version:

(click here for pdf)
Ich habe unter anderem mehr Erlaeuterungen und Neuentwicklungen eingebaut. An anderen stellen habe ich Glenn Brunettes Security Deep Dive fuer weitere Beispiele gepluendert. Glenns Präsentation ist wirklich gut (allerdings auf Englisch). Ich empfehle unbedingt die Lektüre.

Performance of Ubuntu, Opensolaris and Freebsd in comparison

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:54:55 +0100

Phoronix.com published a comparison of this three operating systems - Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD Benchmarks:

For some file-system/disk-centric testing we had used Bonnie++ with the sequential create, random read, and random delete modes. In all three of the tests, OpenSolaris 2008.11 was the champion and had trenched its competition.

and

If simply counting which operating system was in first place most frequently, it would be Ubuntu. Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 was in first place eight times, OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC2 was in first place seven times, and FreeBSD 7.1 Beta 2 AMD64 was in first just three tests. Depending upon your system usage, one operating system may appear more favorable, like OpenSolaris with the greater disk performance.

I would like some additional benchmarks about networking performance.

iSCSI boot integrated to Opensolaris

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:14:48 +0100

I´ve reported back in August that the case for iSCSI boot was approved by the ARC. The PSARC 2008/427 (iSCSI Boot) and PSARC 2008/640 (iSCSI With DHCP) cases had their flag day yesterday for the build 104 of Solaris.

Making Apache privilege aware

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:25:30 +0100

Maybe you remember my RBAC/Privileges-Tutorial in the the LKSF series. In the third part i described how to take away some privileges from the apache processes. But this takes the concept a whole step farther. Nick Kew announced on the Apache developer mailinglist the availability of a module to make Apache privilege-aware - "Introducing mod_privileges for Apache HTTPD:

This is a platform-specific module for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, that makes the webserver privileges(5)-aware. This enables the server to be run with enhanced security, and with different settings per virtual host.

With the use of this module you can define user, group and privileges of a virtual host.

Unlike perchild, mod_privileges is not itself an MPM. It works within a processing model to set privileges and User/Group per request in a running process.

This is a really interesting development: With such a module you can contain every virtual hosts in it´s own user/group combination and more important you can use privileges to controll the possibilities of an virtual hosts at the operating system level. For example you can take away the privileges to execute subprocesses (for example tradtional CGI scripts) at all by a single line of configuration. Really neat ...

ZFS and SSD in storage systems

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:35:17 +0100

Roch wrote an really interesting article about usage of SSD and ZFS in storage systems: Using ZFS as a Network Attach Controller and the Value of Solid State Devices. Worth a read!

Solaris 10 10/08 - out now

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:51:53 +0100

The download page has changed, so you can download it now at the usual locations at the sun website

What´s new in Solaris 10 10/08 (also known as Update 6)

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:14:33 +0100

The "What´s new in What's New in the Solaris 10 10/08 Release" document is online at docs.sun.com. Thus you can get an overview what you can expect from the next release of Solaris 10.

I will provide a list of the features for you in this article. For more informations please consult the linked article. As you see, there was a lot of development in the ZFS part of Solaris 10. Another really interesting feature is the update-on-attach for Zones. This solves some problems like the migration of zones from normal SPARC to a CMT SPARC system (sun4u versus sun4v).

Okay, in Solaris 10/08 aka Update 6 you will find:

Installation Enhancements

Solaris Installation for ZFS Root Pools

System Administration Enhancements

ZFS Command Improvements and Changes

ZFS installation and boot support
Rolling back a ZFS dataset without unmounting
Enhancements to the zfs send command
ZFS quotas and reservations for file system data only
new ZFS storage pool properties
ZFS command history enhancements
support for upgrading ZFS filesystems
ZFS delegated administration
Setting up separate ZFS logging devices
Creating intermediate ZFS datasets
ZFS hot-plugging enhancements
GZIP compression now available for ZFS
Storing multiple copies of ZFS user data

Solaris Installation Tool Support of ZFS File Systems

Solaris interactive text installer to install a UFS or a ZFS root file system.
Custom JumpStart features to set up a profile to create a ZFS storage pool and designate a bootable ZFS file system.
Migrate a UFS root file system to a ZFS root file system by using the Solaris Live Upgrade feature.
Set up a mirrored ZFS root pool by selecting two disks during the installation.
Automatically create swap and dump devices on ZFS volumes in the ZFS root pool.

SunVTS 7.0 Patch Set 3
lockstat Provider for DTrace. DTrace lockstat probes that displayed the spin count (spins) now returns spin time in nanoseconds.

System Resource Enhancements

New Solaris Zones Features

Update on Attach.
If the new host has the same or later versions of the zone-dependent packages and their associated patches, using zoneadm attach with the -u option, updates those packages within the zone to match the new host.[...] This option also enables automatic migration between machine classes, such as from sun4u to sun4v.
Ability to Set Default Router in Shared-IP Zone
ZFS Zone Path Permitted

x86: New GRUB findroot Command
x64: Support for 256 Processors

System Performance Enhancements

SPARC: Solaris SPARC Boot Architecture Redesigned
x86: Kernel Support for Intel SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, and AMD SSE4A

Security Enhancementy
- Separation of Duty Enforcement Through the Solaris Management Console
- SHA256/SHA512 crypt(3C) Plug-in
- pam_list Module
Desktop Enhancements

SPARC: Adobe Reader 8.1.2
Flash Player 9.0.124.0

Networking Enhancements

Communication Protocol Parser Utilities
SIP End-to-end Traffic Measurements and Logging

Device Management Enhancements

Faulty Device Retirement Feature
MPxIO Support for Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage Series Arrays

Driver Enhancements

x86: NVIDIA ck804/mcp55 SATA Controller Driver
x86: LSI MegaRAID SAS Controllers Driver
ixgbe Driver. The ixgbe is a 10 Gigabit PCI Express Ethernet driver that supports Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller.
SPARC: Support for aac Driver

Additional Software Enhancements

Perl Database Interface and Perl PostgreSQL Driver
PostgreSQL 8.3

Language Support Enhancements

IIIMF Hangul Language Engine. The Hangul LE (Language Engine) is a new Korean input method.

Freeware Enhancements

C-URL - The C-URL Wrappers Library
Libidn - Internationalized Domain Library
LibGD - The Graphics Draw Library
TIDY HTML Library

Solaris 10/08

Is the Linux community afraid of Opensolaris?

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:31:05 +0200

Okay,okay ... i know the headline is a little bit provoking. But when you think about some comments from Linux proponents you could think so. In the last few weeks i´ve heard one sentence quite often: "Why you you still develop Solaris? You should contribute to Linux!" from people administering Linux systems. And you could read at other places, that Solaris is irrelevant, that there is nothing worth of mentioning it or even for an integration to Linux. Just think about the Zemlin quotations! Or several other comments of proponents of Linux.
Continue reading "Is the Linux community afraid of Opensolaris?"

Less known Solaris features: About crashes and cores - Appendix B: ::status

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:30:38 +0200

You are logged into your system and doing a little bit of house keeping (archiving of old logfiles, deleting the rubbish on you system like backup files) and suddenly you see a core file. Heck ... you wasn´t aware of the fact, that an application wrote such a file. How can you get some basic information about it? With Solaris you can use the mdb for this task.

Let´s assume you find a core file at / on the system master:

# uname -a
SunOS master 5.11 snv_97 i86pc i386 i86pc
# ls -l core
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     5073385 Oct 10 18:26 core

Now we can start the Modular Debugger mdb with the core file.

# mdb core
Loading modules: [ libc.so.1 ld.so.1 ]
>

After a short moment the mdb command will give you a prompt. Now just type in the ::status command

> ::status
debugging core file of sshd (32-bit) from master
file: /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
initial argv: /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
threading model: native threads
status: process core file generated with gcore(1)

Now you know, that you can savely ignore the file, as the system created it on your order while you was playing around with gcore.

"Linux feels like it was written. Solaris feels like it was designed."

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:46:00 +0200

Neil A. Wilson wrote an interesting article why he choosen Solaris as is favourite operating environment: "Why i like Solaris". It´s an article about some features of Solaris, but there is one paragraphy that summarizes an important reason of my choice for Solaris many years ago as well:

Linux feels like it was written. Solaris feels like it was designed.. While I think that Suns development processes can sometimes be a little heavyweight, and I think that Sun is trying to retain too much control over OpenSolaris, there is a lot to be said for having processes in place to guide development.

This is the basic difference. Linux is based on the concept "Okay, you can develop a feature and we will see if we integrate it into the mainline code." Opensolaris works differently in this area. The concept of PSARC may look as an heavyweight process for an opensource operating system, but it´s the reason for "Solaris feels like it was designed." as the documented review of the design and the analysis of the impact to the whole architecture is the beginning of all code in Solaris.

Project Sirius

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:08:19 +0200

At last: The IBM mainframes will get a decent operating system. Project Sirius is at least one to two years away from prime time but at least it´s a silver lining on the horizon.

A kind of Time Machine

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:58:43 +0200

The Time Machine in Mac OS 10.5 saved my butt a few times in the last few months. Getting back an older version of a presentation when you´ve saved a short version of you presentation in the same file as the long version a few days earlier is quite handy. Solaris is now capable to do a similar thing (albeit the implementation is vastly different): Time Slider is based on periodic ZFS snapshots and presents them in a nice way:

Time slider is one of the new feature that will be available in OpenSolaris 2008.11.Time slider provides an automatic way to backup your data on the same disc using one of Sun's ZFS filesystem unique features, snapshots. With time slider you can browse and recover files from snapshot backups using the GNOME file manager.

When you click on the life buoy in the File Brower you get a slider to step back in time based on this snapshhhhhh ... wait ... just look at the screenshots at Erwann Chénedé's weblog. A picture substitutes 1000 words and this feature is outright incredible. Excellent work!

My first article has gone live on SDN

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:07:45 +0200

With a huge amount of help from Marina Sum the first article from the LKSF book made it to the Sun Developer Network: Introducing pfexec, a Convenient Utility in the OpenSolaris OS.

L2ARC on ramdisks?

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:47:36 +0200

I thought a little bit about the idea of transforming server into solid state disks. The idea in the mail of Chris Greer on zfs-discuss was to use mirrored iSCSI shared ramdisks as a storage for the seperated ZILs. But i think you could use the concept as well for L2ARC as well - e.g. for large databases. One of the sizing rules of databases: More main memory never hurts. Nothing helps the performance of a database more than even more memory. The rule of "main memory never hurts" is based on the fact, that a hard disk has only a few IOPS compared with the main memory and hard drive access massively hurts the performance of your database.

But obviously the size of memory is limited, albeit the this limit is quite high with systems with memory sizes in the range of 512 GB on 4 rack units. But how can you get more memory into your database system, when all DIMM slots are filled with the biggest available DIMMS.

I had an idea while cooking tea this evening while i thought about a discussion with a colleague: Let´s assume an architecture based on a X4600 as a head in front of four X4600 each fully maxed to 512GB. All the nodes are connected with Infiniband. The first X4600 is your normal database server (for example mysql or LarryBase). You put your data into an ZFS storage pool. This storage pool is augumented with L2ARC devices. But now comes the plot twist. Let´s use the 512GB X4600 as huge ramdisks (yes, i know, every engineers heart will crying now) speaking via iSER (no TCP/IP, just RDMA) at 20 GBit/s to the central database node. This would give you a cache in the size of almost 2 TB plus the cache on the database server itself.. By using L2ARC you could use the memory as database caches of other systems without using a database doing a combination of the memory resources by other means, for example the CacheFusion stuff of Oracle. You don´t have to fuse the caches of other databases servers. The other servers are caches. You don´t have to partition the databases.

It would be interesting how such an system would perform in comparision to a Oracle RAC or other memory implementations. Anybody out there willing to test this ... my Infiniband switches are in the laundry at the moment

Anatomy of an attack

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:07:25 +0200

Paul Murphy wrote an excellent article about the anti-Solaris article that even found it´s syndication at the NYT. Paul writes in Anatomy of an attack: The New York Times on Solaris:

The piece itself illustrates the standard recipe for attack journalism: use a title sure to attract the attention of editors sympathetic to your cause; pretend to balance in the article but actually use strong negatives and weak positives; find one or two third parties to attribute the really nasty stuff to; and, strip any facts you need of their real context while leveraging reader assumptions to add an emotional patina of your own.

Thus using Sun Solaris in the title instead instead of just Solaris or OpenSolaris invokes one of the not so secret handshakes characteristic of the anti-Sun community to grab the attention of any editor with a Microsoft or IBM agenda.

It´s an really interesting analysis of the article. I really thing that we will see more attacks in the future as Opensolaris get a more and more viable alternative to Linux in many "linux-only" shops. Paul ask at the end of it´s article. "Qui bono". I don´t know ... wait ... of course i know it, but i can´t pinpoint the exact source. But i´m sure of more attacks of this kind. There is a market share to loose.

Opensolaris at Smugmug

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 10:09:45 +0200

Don MacAskill (the CEO of SmugMug - yeah CEO and geekdom isn´t mutually exclusive) did an interesting experiment - he used an Opensolaris system for one of his database replicas. And his experiences were really positive (besides of the usual pet peeve we already working on ):

Im a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMugs datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and its been awful for at least 8 years. As a result, weve put our first OpenSolaris box into production at SmugMug and Ive been pleasantly surprised with the performance

The configuration has a really interesting speciality. He used compression.

Lo and behold, it worked! Were getting a 2.12X compression ratio on our DB, and performance is keeping up just fine. I ran some quick performance tests on large linear reads/writes and we were measuring 45.6MB/s sustained uncompression and 39MB/s sustained compression on a single-threaded app on an Opteron CPU.

Separated ZIL on ramdisk.

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:28:12 +0200

I used ramdisks today in a live presentation of ZFS, L2ARC and sZIL (you can´t use files for sZIL and L2ARC testing, you need a device). One of the customers asked me if there is a real use case for this configuration. My answer was: Not really. But this question haunted me the whole day while sitting in the train.
Continue reading "Separated ZIL on ramdisk."

MSI Wind PC and Opensolaris

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:53:45 +0200

I just bought a MSI Wind PC . This is a device in the so-called "Nettop" range. 1.6 GHz Atom, 1 GB RAM, 320 GB harddisk and 30 Watts of power consumption in a small case. I bought it as the foundation of my new home storage server. I just put a first Opensolaris test installation on the system. I did a test installation of Opensolaris Build 99. It detected the network card, i was able to ping my router, the GNOME desktop was configured with the correct resolution (1440*900). I was really pleased by this experience, as the RealTek 8111C NIC was known for making problems with older releases of Opensolaris.

Over the next days day i will transform this into a storage server with ZFS,SamFS et al. The internal disks will be the cache for SamFS, the external USB disks will be the archive storage for this system. I hope to put the archive harddisks to sleep at most of the time by this configuration due to activated power management.

Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t - revisited

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:36:34 +0200

Eigentlich wollte ich das Thema "ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t" mit dem letzte Artikel abschliessen, aber meine Anmerkungen haben doch so viele Reaktionen zur Folge gehabt, das ich mich dazu entschlossen habe, mit einem Artikel darauf zu reagieren, um noch mal einige Dinge zu erlaeutern.
Continue reading "Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t - revisited"

Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:08:26 +0200

Die c´t schreibt im Artikel ueber ZFS:

Aber auch ein RAID-Z kann richtig kaputtgehen: Als wir im laufenden Betrieb aus einem RAID-Z1-Verbund mit drei Platten zwei entfernten und mit zpool status den Status des Speicherpools erfragen wollten, hing der zpool befehl bei maximaler Plattenaktivität - und das stundenlang. Auch andere Befehle wie df oder fs, die Informationen des Dateisystem erfragen, blieben hängen. Selbst ein Shutdown gelang nicht mehr, erst nach einem harten Reset ließ sich der defekte Speicherpool retten.

Okay, dieses Verhalten von ZFS ist ein erwuenschtes Verhalten. Das RAID-Z ist in diesem Moment nicht mal kaputt. Nein ... das ist kein Schönreden eines ZFS fanboys. Ich will das mal im folgenden Text erlaeutern.

Continue reading "Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t"

ZFS in der c´t

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:23:51 +0200

In der aktuellen Ausgabe der c´t (21/2008 vom 29.9.2008) kann der geneigte Leser auf den Seiten 194 bis 199 ein gutes Tutorial zum Thema ZFS finden. Positiv geschrieben. Leider hat die c´t eine Chance ausgelassen. Zwar ist in der Zeitschrift auch ein Bericht auch ueber Solid State Disks, aber im ZFS-Bericht fehlt der Hinweis auf die Konfiguration von sZIL und L2ARC (zugegebenermassen erwaehnt der Autor es im letzten Absatz). Hätte vielleicht auch zu grosse Begeisterungsstuerme in der Leserschaft pro ZFS ausloesen koennen

Open Storage Summit Keynote

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:43:52 +0200

Ben Rockwood gave a really interesting keynote at the first Open Storage Summit about "Storage in the Cloud". When you are interested in storage with Opensolaris it´s definitly worth a look.

Virtual Consoles with Opensolaris

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:09:59 +0200

One of the features missed by Linux Admins on Solaris is the absence of virtual consoles. Opensolaris Build 100 will bring this functionality to Solaris 10. There is even a nice feature called "Secure Switch":

Secure switch is enabled by default which means you need to enter the login user's password if switching to a login-ed session.

The Register about Ikkaku

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:16:59 +0200

TPM wrote a article about an Sun/Fujitsu server at the bottom end of the APL M-class product line: Fujitsu and Sun arm juttejutsu server with quad-core processor. I won´t comment on the details, but the explanation of the codename is ... hmmm ... interesting ... especially when you know that you just have to type in "+ikkaku +sun" to get the official explanation . It has nothing to do with swords, at least not with ones made of steel:

Ikkaku is a Japanese name for "Narwhal", an Arctic cetacean/whale, about 20 feet long; the male has a single twisted pointed canine tooth or tusk projecting forward like a horn. The Japanese word literally mean "single horn".

SUNW,UltraSPARC-AT10

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:33:27 +0200

Yet another interesting integration to Solaris this week. The PSARC/2007/003 Solaris Support for the Rock Processor found it´s way in the build 100 of Opensolaris.