Comments on: Solaris SATA chipsets I can run ZSF with

By: unisol

unisol — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:11:24 +0000

No, this doesn’t work, at least on FreeBSD. If each user has hist own FS – it has to be shared and mounted separately. Sun is aware of the problem – it should be present with any unix system – you can’t share other FS even if it’s mounted into subdirectory of a parent FS. Sun proposes to use automaunter for facilitation of the whole thing – but it’s sort of weird to have 1000 shares mounted, even if it’s fully-automated.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/xperts/sessions/21_zfs/#5

By: Kebabbert

Kebabbert — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 19:13:27 +0000

I have similar problem. I think I will just buy an external SATA2 card, this way I dont have to worry about motherboards.
This card AoC-SAT2-MV8.cfm is reported to work (two sites) with Solaris:
http://napobo3.blogspot.com/2006/04/sata2-under-b36.html

It is PCI-X, however several people says PCI-X works in a normal PCI slot. Best would be in a server mobo.

By: Marko

Marko — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:59:00 +0000

You do not have to share 1000 file systems… assuming you have /home/$user shares, you just have to share /home, and all children FS will be shared as well, just as if they were directories on a single FS.

By: unisol

unisol — Mon, 21 May 2007 09:05:41 +0000

Solaris is not good for lots of people as well:
1. It’s package management sucks.
2. Compiling lots of things requires much more effort than it does using FreeBSD ports collection, more effort then doing that on some Linux, and generally requires knowledge of what you are doing and how this should be done on Solaris – e.g. no /usr/local in it (surely, you can create it, edit the paths and so on…). No common tools as well that one is used to have on *BSD/Linux

By: unisol

unisol — Mon, 21 May 2007 04:15:41 +0000

Actively using FreeBSD 7-current and not very happy:
1. It says it’s recommended to have 512M+ RAM – the statement doesn’t have much to do with reality.
It doens’t matter how much ram you have, you can go rock-stable with 256M and have it crash with 1GB even after tuning of the kernel memory size. The outcome depends on how actively you are using the ZFS – looks like under heavy load you may cause either some sort of race conditions or it’s just “not enough” kernel memory – but kernel panics and you may be lucky if the whole thing reboots. No data loss was observed. Running zpool scrub may eat lots of kernel memory as well.
2. As I said before – you may be lucky if the whole thing reboots after a kernel panic and not just freezes.
3. ztest fails almost at once, but that’s more about threading library problems, I guess.
4. I really doubt that ZFS will be usable until something changes in kernel architecture (that is kernel memory outage will not cause panic, at least), or ZFS will be tunable to use a fixed amount of kernel memory – or else it’ll not matter how much ram you have you will still be able to crash under active usage patterns – that is e.g. rapidly creating, writing and deleting lots of small files. This requires relatively fast CPU/drives, or you’ll be unable to crash :).
5. ZFS concept of giving 1 user 1 file system instead of disk quota and general idea of having tons of FS doesn’t look so well when you have to share that over NFS – instead of sharing just one folder you’ll have to share 1000?! Nonsense…

By: dansketcher

dansketcher — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:02:50 +0000

I have to say I am hanging out for that.

Yeah, FreeBSD is a better choice for me on a home box – the Solaris installer was a little ‘antique’. The only problem I have on FreeBSD is dependency management in ports – I think I just don’t know how to administer it well yet, so that makes it my fault, not its. I do hear good things about Solaris in production unix boxen though…

By: Robbo

Robbo — Tue, 15 May 2007 22:29:17 +0000

Nice link :)

I’ll agree with the bastard comment but I’ll give FreeBSD cudos for the handbook which makes it a bit easier to get up and going and stay up and going for newbies.

Still waiting to see what we can do with ZFS under the hood in Leopard …

By: dansketcher

dansketcher — Tue, 15 May 2007 07:51:30 +0000

Thanks mate, i remember that article when it came out and that was just the announcement of the patch – but now it looks like its in the tree:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-April/070616.html

FreeBSD was a bit of a bastard too, but it’s a bastard that I know how to use :)

By: Robbo

Robbo — Tue, 15 May 2007 00:51:03 +0000

Dude, did you realise that FreeBSD now includes ZFS support?

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/15581/ZFS-Ported-to-FreeBSD

After tangling with the OpenSolaris installer I think I’ll get some FreeBSD lovin’ for the home server.

By: Pål Baltzersen

Pål Baltzersen — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:33:05 +0000

I needed support for at least 6 SATA disks in ZFS
(plus root-fs Disksuite-mirrored on two PATA)

I have tested Solaris10_u3 (11/06) on two SATA based boards
One I can recommend and one i won’t recommend:

1) MSI K9N Platinum :) Recommended
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=730
It has “everything you need” and everything works “out of the box”:
nForce570Ultra,DDR2,Socket-AM2,2xGbLAN,USB,Firew,PCI-Ex16,
1xPATA-133, 6xSATA2, ALC883 7.1 :)
Only thing I added was OSS http://www.opensound.com/download.cgi to get Linux-familiar sound. (not needed on a fileserever)

2) MSI K8N Diamond Plus :/ It works, *but*
nForce4 SLI X16, Socket-939, SB Audigy, GbLAN, PCI-Ex16
The second Ether-NIC Marvell Yukon is only supported via a skgesol_x64v8.19.1.3.tar.Z (or newer) from SysKonnect http://www.skd.de/e_en/support/driver.html
The onboard Sil3132 does *not* work (beacuse it has RAID-BIOS and cant be patched to non-RAID)
Sil3132 cards was the only PCIe-based I could find at a resonable price, and blogs indicated it might work, so I bought a Sil3132 add-incard. A big *hack* was needed to get it working. First I had to flash the BIOS to non-RAID (download from Silicon Image). The Solaris10 11/06 paniced repeatedly at boot when i added ’si3124 “pci1095,3132″‘ to /etc/driver_aliases ! So I figured out the blogs indicating succes were about Solaris11 (aka Nevada, Express) — *not* Solaris10. So I downloaded Solaris Nevada Express, and replaced the Solaris10 11/06 SUNWsi3124 (pkgrm) with SUNWsi3124 (pkgadd) from Nevada. It worked and has been stable for 3 months now. *But* beware: Regular kernel-patches wilreplace the alien SUNWsi3124! It is a Hack and i works OK for ZFS, but don’t do this with root-fs! (ZFS is robust, so it just makes the ZFS pool unawailable till the problem is fixed in case the alien SUNWsi3124 drops out, and goes online again when you have hacked back SUNWsi3124 (even if /dev/dsk has been renumbered :)