Oh. I forgot the CC-field..

-- 
Vidar


-----Original Message-----
Hi,

No problem Sanjay. I'll fill out the survey :-)
Might be a lengthy text.. hehe

I've used Windows server 2003 for some years, and I've lost lots of data
on failed software-raids. 
Personal data like digital photos etc is backed up on a irregular basis,
but silent datacorruption is often not discovered until years after, and
then I might not have a working backup anymore. My wife doesn't like
when things disappear, so I had to find another solution.
I don't buy the usual argument that "this would never happen on linux".
Its not windows fault that drives fail. And without some checksuming no
raid5 implementation I know of can handle this properly. We experience
silent datacorruption at work with hw-raid6 also..

So I decided to try ZFS.
I've used both linux and BSD before, and the later would be my first
choice. Mainly because I've never used solaris before, and I'm more "at
home" on BSD than linux. But the ZFS support there seems to be poor, and
I thougt it would be better to go to the source.. And it couldn't be
THAT hard to start with a new OS.

The main problem I faced was drivers.. I had two Intel SRCS28X
controllers, and couldn't get them to work.
So just to get started I added two older sata disks to the controller on
my motherboard, just to discover that it wasn't supported either :-)
The MB-controller could "emulate" IDE, and that did the trick for me.
Regarding the SCRS28x controllers, I found a modified megaraid-300
driver after some googling. It seems to work fine. 16 disks online, but
since the controller won't let me present the disks directly to
opensolaris, I cant use hotplug. I have to define a raid0-volume for
each disk. Noting to do with the OS anyway.
I've ordered an Adaptec 21610SA from ebay, and hope it will let me
present the disks directly to opensolaris.

The installation process was really easy. I was surprised when I didn't
have to answer any questions, and seriously doubted it would work as I
wanted when finished.
I booted from a CD, and clicked on "install opensolaris" on the desktop.

I've convinced two colleagues to try solaris too. Its easier when we are
more than one. Sharing ideas etc.. 
They both had problems with controller drivers. I think they had various
Silicon Image controllers for SATA drives, and a Promise fasttrack 376
PDC20376 onboard. I think they solved it by changing from raid-firmware
to "regular" on the Silicons, but I don't think the promise controller
worked. Im not sure.
One of them has a running opensolaris "server" at home now. The other
one is waiting for new storagecontrollers from ebay.

After that I had some problems adding a mirrordisk too my rpool. I'm not
really sure how I pulled it off, but I have a mirrored rpool now.. I
didn't find the format/fdisk tools very user friendly. But somehow I
managed to get it working.

I've never used X much, and was pleased to discover that ssh was enabled
and ready to use from remote.

Since most "users" in my house uses windows, and I have a domain
controller from earlier. I decided to join my new opensolaris-box to the
windows domain. I found a nice tutorial on a sun-blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/timthomas/entry/configuring_the_opensolaris_cifs_se
rver
This worked flawless, and I was soon up and running with a smb-share on
opensolaris. I could manage permissions in filesystem from windows.
Inheritance and everything works fine. I tried copy from windows with
ACL using robocopy /COPY:DATO, worked fine too.
Then after some hours and some GB data, I got an "share not found"
message, and it looked like the share was gone from opensolaris. From
windows it looked like the server was gone. But it answered on ping, and
ssh worked fine. So I concluded it must be something with the smb
service. I tried restarting it with svcadm, but it couldn't be stopped.
I even tried kill -9, but no luck. Then I tried to reboot, but nothing
happened. It just told me over and over that smb could not be stopped.
(I don't have the exact message).
After googling some more, I found out it might be a bug in cifs on
2009.06, and I tried image-upgrade to 118. The "reboot" problem went
away, but cifs still stops after a while. I'm now on 122, and it's the
same..
I'm not sure whats causing it. It looks like its not so frequent on the
newest build, but it could be because its less load now, after all my
data is copied.
Maybe I have to create a cronjob that restarts cifs every night, or
something. Or just wait and see if it get fixed later.

My colleagues and I discussed trying solaris at work, for storage
server. It certainly has the features. With zfs and iscsi target etc..
With the upcoming deduplication it would be a sure winner. But I doubt
the dedup will do any good if we share out areas over iSCSI, and in
order to use the zfs directly over cifs it has to be a lot more stable,
I think. So for now, we will play with it at home :-)

I was really impressed by the "image-update" feature. Upgrading the
kernel and all packages with one command. AND it worked. :-)
My first experience is good. I expected driver issues, and was correct.
The rest just takes some time to get used to, I guess.


-- 
Vidar


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: 10. september 2009 04:17
To: Nilsen, Vidar
Subject: Re: [indiana-discuss] SUNWrtorrent

Nilsen, Vidar wrote:
> James wrote:
>   
>> Nilsen, Vidar wrote:
>>     
>>> It looks like the package is compiled without the "--with-xmlrpc-c"
>>> switch, which makes it hard to add more "userfriendly" interfaces
>>>       
> like
>   
>>> wtorrent etc.
>>>
>>> I'm wondering if there is some place one can request features, or
>>> wishes? I can't find any  contact information in the package, nor on
>>>       
> web
>   
>>> ...
>>>       
>> Nilsen,
>>
>> You can work with Alex Zhang, the maintainer, on this. I'm ccing him.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Jim
>>     
>
> Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
> I've checked the webpage for transmission-client mentioned by others.
> Maybe I can use that instead.
> My opensolaris-box is a "headless" box with lots of disks. I use it
> primary for storage.
> It would be ideal with a client I could manage over web or something.
> It certainly looks like transmission can do what I want.
>
> Maybe I'll dare use opensolaris on my main computer, when I get a
little
> more experience :-)
>
>   
Sorry for bugging you. But I would greatly appreciate your views as a 
new user to OpenSolaris.  Specifically what were the issues that you 
encountered ?  What can we do better.  I know this sounds like a survey,

but it's not.  Often the first experiences are useful in helping 
transition or expose hidden issues.

-Sanjay


> Alex: Is there any chance of including xmlrpc in this package in the
> future?
>
>   

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