Dibbler's Net

ZFS and Boot -http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/boot/

Normally I am not wowed by File systems. ufs has just worked forever. Most of the time I end up using vxfs because veritas is somehow involved, the added bonus there is the shared file access and other veritas features. With Sun getting into the clustering game more and more and now they are working the filesystem game. First they bought their way into QFS with the storagetek buy. QFS if you haven’t played with it is a really slick shared filesystem. Having used it with some policy based file systems QFS is really nice. The 4,000$ per system can make it a bit costly but still worlds cheaper than veritas. Now along comes ZFS, with things like massive partition sizes, the new promise of no fsck’ing and a promise that someday ZFS and QFS will merge making a really robust file system.

So the early adopters have been playing with ZFS and I really like it. The one draw back has been no boot support for a ZFS filesystem. Well that is now the fast up and comer and hopefully now that it is in opensolaris will soon make it into Solaris 10 sparc builds.

So check out the developer page and if you haven’t used ZFS yet give it a try.

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Okay so found this on the Dvorak blog. All I can say is wow, a theme song can make a big difference in a show. Makes you wonder what the show would have been like or how long it would have lasted if they kept to the pilot setup. :D

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I finally found time to install Nagvis this weekend on a small Nagios server I manage. http://nagvis.org/

Nagvis is a really interesting idea that allows you display network status in a more graphical option. I believe in simple, let the monitor show me only what is broken. But there are times and places where you want to show the overall map. The part I really liked about Nagvis is that it allows me to export any of my existing network drawings as a png and then add service and host data on top of it to make it dynamic. When I firs saw Nagvis in action I thought it would configure similar to Nagios 3D status or some of the others where you hand coordinate everything and it can take a long time to get everything lined up just right.

The Install:
Well as the sys req’s say Nagvis depends on NDO. I personally have worked to avoid NDO since I have always liked having my Nagios work without a Database dependency. However sometimes a DB is needed and I hadn’t been through the process lately. Luckily my PHP was already V5 and I had GD pre-compiled in. I am running on FreeBSD 6 and had one issue with mysql compiling right. That was easily fixed with a gcc -I that wasn’t adding in right.

Once that was done NDO was compiled and I was ready to start. Nagvis was easy to install but I do need to spend some time looking at the file perm changes it asks for. Once installed the configuration part was easy and pretty much worked right out of the box.

While I feel the use of this type of tool is limited for help desk use I do see where it has management and/or customer access appeal. Now that I have it running I will see how well it works on a running setup for a few weeks and report back. Overall I say kudos to the Nagvis team on a good extension to Nagios.

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