Dibbler's Net

ZFS Hammer or Drill time

So there are a few videos around regarding ZFS and failed drives. Part of what they are showing is how well ZFS as a filesystem deals with 1 and 2 driver failures. This is worlds better than Raid 5 and is a strong point of ZFS.

However these is another side to ZFS that is hard to talk about using a hammer. This is the whole new world of No Partitions. This past month I have been playing with Solaris 10/08 which gave us ZFS as a boot partition for Sparc. I have been waiting for this for about a year and now having played with it I love it. The number of arguments I have had regarding / /opt /var and /usr partitioning in the past have been too many. What works in some places fails miserably in others. Most of the time you become the new owner of a legacy system with partitioning you hate. Add onto this that growing partitions was never really “easy” in the past. Now with ZFS partitions are gone, kaput, dead, no more, and just don’t exist. You have volumes and quota’s but no partitions. While watching one Sun demo the presenter made the comment that when working on ZFS they went with they idea that with any system you can add memory and it’s there. You just start using it. They wanted to do the same with disks. With ZFS they truly have gotten there. There is a learning curve to this and I need to start re-training people that fsck is dead long live scrubbing. But it’s also nice they way Copy on Write is being used with parity to better validate that I just won’t have corrupted data to start. Also the fact that it’s 128 bit file system and very cross platform compatible makes it an easy sell. Now I beg the Sun team to please bring the QFS file sharing into ZFS so I truly have one solution.

If you haven’t read up on ZFS I recommend going to the ZFS Learning Center

Derrick

Found this through the Sun Blogs Award Winners.

Now reading through the winners there are some great submissions. One of these really grabbed my interest. Everyone seems to be working towards a LAMP, AMP, or other package of all you need. These packages normally give you Apache, Mysql, PHP, and some other tools in an easy to install and use setup. The one that I was drawn to was the one called Cayac (details here)

Cherokee - http://www.cherokee-project.com/
    Maybe I am out of touch, but I have not heard of cherokee before this. Overall I really like the idea that this project is working towards. There is always a better mouse trap, and in this case a different web server. We are all very very used to apache. We can do apache configs in our sleep and there is a module for apache to do everything but wash dishes. Cherokee looks like it’s taken that idea and focused it into a specific application for doing the generic work of serving web pages. Apache always works but sometimes it takes real time to get compiled just the way you need it. Also in this day and age anytime you can simplify management it makes support and deployment easier.

Now back to Cayac. Cayac is a nice package for Solaris that gives you Cherokee, MySQL, PHP 5, and phpMyAdmin all in one easy to use package. This makes your initial server setup for that quick application that much easier. I currently have a small quick setup project that needs a quick backend and simple setup. I plan to give this a try and see how it works. At the same time I am very happy to see that people are working to create and improve on those things we think of as staples in our environment. With competition comes better software for everyone. Congratulations to the Cayac team and thanks to Sun for making money available to opensource projects.

At the same time I must plug blogs.sun.com. There are specific Sun Blogs that I read all the time, but from the blogs site you can see all posts and quickly see what is new at Sun and what is hot based on how many entries you see for the same information.

Derrick

It was only a matter of time but the next evolution in the desktop is here with DesktopTwo. Sponsored by Sun this new free service gives you a virtual desktop.

* Caveat. With all cloud services you need to balance the service vs the risk of having your data on someone else’s systems.

I signed up and logged in. Besides the requirement for Flash this service works really well. The display is clean and the apps are useful and full featured. I will spend some more time to see just how ready and willing I am to move to this type of thing but this would be a nice jump in technology from where remote desktop is today and remote computing for the office workforce. Once we are able to completely move back to a dumb terminal / server option we will not have completed our full circle back to mainframe based computing as things were when I started. I am very interested in how this completion of the computing technology cycle will open a new wave of client /server and client computing in the next circle of technology advancements.

I was also very pleases to see that the parent company Sapotek have not only made this open for development of new apps but they have made the whole system open which means you can run this as your internal desktop system using any assortment of web client machines. With the requirement to be on Windows, or Mac, or Linux no longer there and only a base requirement for bandwidth and a browser we will see less dependecny on the big OS makers and more control by the corporate IT departments. Most people would say that this is bad but in my mind it isn’t. Back with dumb terminals and mainframe’s security truly was easier. When you are dealing with the app security and not every desktop it does help to simplify and reduce the burden of work. The old adage used to be that any system could pass C2 requirements, all you needed to do was remove the network card, video card, keyboard, and lock it in a room. Once that was done you had one of the most secure OS’s around. It may seem like a joke but the reality is there. The less doors and windows on a house the easier it is to secure those few entry points. The less software or desktop machines the easier it will be to not have your data breach end up on the front page of the local news. Please do not take this to say that Cloud Desktops are the answer to security. I don’t mean that at all. I just see that the cycle coming back around to dumb terminal and mainframe (server) systems has some ability to simplify one aspect of a security model.

So go to their website, sign up and give it a try.

D~