Learning Solaris 10 Check out the Zones F.A.Q. !

With pointers to reference docs of all drivers.

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A developers.sun.com article that talks about the performance of the NFS distributed file system. Issues appeared with the growth of NFS shares that come from the use of ZFS.

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With a new job comes a new laptop. I went for Acer Aspire 9424WSMi. It of course comes with Windows Media Center preinstalled. Because I’m gonna work with production Solaris machines, I decided that it would be best to install Solaris on it. Here is the results of my attempts :

1. Tried to install official Solaris 10 06/06. Installation successful but laptop crashes very early during boot. Too early to find out the guilty device driver.
2. Installed Solaris Express 11/06. No problem whatsoever. Nvidia card recognised, beautiful desktop out of the box. Networking fine thanks to an updated version of the rge Realtek Gigabit Ethernet Driver. Would have loved to stop there BUT… I need to install JES on top of Solaris and for whatever unexplained reason, the JES installer crashes at launch time. Couldn’t find anything on the internet on the subject. Of course, one can try to install every JES product manually. But I need many so that wasn’t so practical. Strangely enough, in the stacktrace output of the installer error, it showed a method called “checkOsVersion”. Would that be the reason ?
3. Installed official Solaris 10 11/06. No crash during boot. Great. But no network. The “rge” driver is not the updated release so that it cannot take my NIC. Tried to use the “rge” driver of Solaris Express/Opensolaris but that failed as well, some network projects having been integrated with some dependencies between them.

And the solution is : on December 19, an updated “gani” driver showed up on the Free NIC drivers for Solaris superb page. some “modload” later, I could type :
#ifconfig gani0 plumb
#ifconfig gani0 dhcp

and I had got the net work…

Still to be done : I have no wireless yet. This is normal because the laptop uses a Intel 3945ABG chipset for which even OpenSolaris doesn’t have a driver yet (in development right now).

But I have enough to start working…

Go to the Infodoc

BigAdmin article giving information about SLAMD. “SLAMD focuses only on application testing, with many advanced features dedicated to this activity. This is the ideal tool for the final qualification phase.”

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A very concise and to-the-point set of slides presented at Lisa 05 conference by a NetApp employee co-author of several NFS specifications. Includes a comparison NFSv3 versus NFSv4.

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T: NFSv4, OpenSolaris

Great chapters of the upcoming book Solaris internals, “The Magic Revealed” says everything about the new TCP/IP stack only found in Solaris 10 ( & OpenSolaris ) of course…

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T: Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, Networking

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Two interesting articles about the history, the present & the future of storage. Useful to get the big picture of the storage market without being lost in the details.

Titled “Commentary about IP Storage Directions”, this post from Richard Mc Dougall is a very well thought Sun-oriented point of view of where the storage world is heading to. It includes some historical notes about SAN & NAS, describes the newer iSCSI protocol and how it could be used as a temporary solution in the possible migration from SAN to NAS. Using NFSv4, the one you find already ready in Solaris 10.

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The second article is a technical essay that starts by describing memory caches to end up describing the complete hierarchy of backing store, starting from CPU registers to tapes. Includes some details on tools (cpustat, cputrack) that can be used on Linux & Solaris to get statistics about how well the caches are used.

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T : nfs iSCSI

Amazing :

The default value for sq_max_size is 2 in Solaris version 9 and earlier.
The default value for sq_max_size is 10000 in SOlaris 10.

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