unixwiz

Time to Backup 300+ gig of data: 8 hours
Time to install Solaris 10 06/06 : 1 hour
Time to fix the PATA controller card: 10 minutes
Time to create a mirrored 387 gig ZFS file system: 5.2 seconds

For some people MS Windows is the only thing they know, but for others if you use Solaris and ZFS, things go much faster and are much better.

Now that I have a ZFS file system, I can clone my zones instead of having to install each one. I really like zfs!

One note, that I came across creating a zfs file system. One of the disks previously had a ufs file system on it and it would not let me create the pool. to get around it I did this:

The error that caused me to do this was:

Solaris, ZFS, Zones/Containers Solaris, ZFS, Zones/Containers

I decieded to upgrade the home file server to the newest version of solaris 10.. first I copied all the data off of the machine (about 300gig) to another machine so I can use ZFS once it gets reloaded. Reloading went fine, except Solaris failed to see the Adaptec PATA controller card that has the 2 400 GB harddrives on it.. In the old version of solaris 10 all I had to do was edit the /boot/solaris/devicedb/master file and add in “pci1095,680 pci-ide msd pci ata.bef “Silicon Image 680 PATA Controller”", and then reboot and go in to the DCA and “find” the new device. Well this does not work with new boot. So to get the controller to show up, I still put it in the master file, but then had to run

Once the machine booted, my drives showed up. Now off to create some ZFS file systems!

Solaris, ZFS Solaris, ZFS

I was starting to run out of storage on the home file server (Solaris 10 x86 with Dual Pentium III’s and 2 120 gig mirrored drives for storage.) I happen to be looking through the Sunday weekly ad’s and saw that a local vendor was selling Seagate 400GB PATA drives for $159.99. So 2 drives and a PATA Card later, I now have 479 Gig of mirrored storage now. (The 400 Gb is actually 372, when are vendors going to start putting the actual size on the box?).. Anyways, It was extremely easy to add the space:

What the filesystem looked like before the change:

Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d30        112G   100G    11G    91%    /home

Output of metastat:

d10: Submirror of d30
State: Okay
Size: 239077440 blocks (114 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1d0s0 0 No Okay Yes

d20: Submirror of d30
State: Okay
Size: 239077440 blocks (114 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1d1s0 0 No Okay Yes

next attach the new drives to the existing devices:

Now comes something that I am not use to.. Usually when I am doing this command I am on a large Sparc server with fibre channel drives or luns presented from the SAN so it usually doesn’t take that long. But on my little machine this command took almost 2 hours to complete:

A trip to McDonalds and back, and watching some Simpsons, War at Home, and Family Guy and it is complete:

# df -h /home
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d30        479G   100G   378G    21%    /home

I still have one port available on it, so later down the road once the 750GB drives get out, I may add a couple of them as well. Now I should have plenty of room for files and video storage from the ReplayTV units. Next time I will do it, I will be reloading the OS and putting the filesystem under ZFS control as well.

Interesting, Solaris, ZFS Interesting, Solaris, ZFS

Yippie, ZFS is finaly available for people to use. Still seems a little buggy, or it could just be the old hardware I was trying it on. Anyways, I setup an old Dell machine at the office with Solaris 11 build 27 (AKA Solaris Express) and then put in a 7gb and a 12gb drive that I found in some other machines laying around. Well since the 2 extra drives were not the same size I could not mirror them so I tried to make a stripped file system:

Well that seemed easy. So I then tried to create some file systems in side of the /mypool file system:

and here is where the fun began. The machine instantly rebooted. What came next I was not expecting. The machine went in to an infinite loop of rebooting it self. It seems that the second harddrive had a couple bad sectors on it. What was interesting was that instead of just not mounting the file system and coming up, it destoryed the /etc/path_to_inst file, and also the boot archive. So I booted in to single user mode to fix the boot archive and then tried rebooting again and it continued to crash. So I booted back in to single user again and tried to figure out how to disable the zfs.. Only thing I could find quickly (with out search other people’s blogs, and the web) by looking in /etc was a directory called zfs, in there there was one file called zpool.cache. I deleted this file and rebooted and it booted right back up.

Next up was trying to find how how to fix it. I ran a format/analyze/compare on the drive and it came back fine. So I tried to recreate the pool and it would not let me, kept complaining about the EFI labels being wrong. format/fdisk would not let me clean the disk. So I ended up doing something I never thought I would have to do, boot in to MS Windows XP. Windows showed the disks as GPT protected disks and the gui disk manager would not let me change anything on them. However the DOS based diskpart command would let me “clean” the disk of the EFI/GPT and so everything was fine now. Booted back in to solaris and I was now able to recreate the pool. This time I left the second disk out.
And then it was quiting time, so I need to find a better machine to play with….

OpenSolaris, Solaris, ZFS OpenSolaris, Solaris, ZFS