I blame ZFS for this one, but it was inevitable anyway. I love my Sun Cobalt Qube 3 to bits, but it is getting rather long in the tooth. A while back I migrated most of my home network services to Solaris 10 on my son's old Athlon PC. It now has four large IDE drives serving our house with over 300GB of mirrored storage (using Solaris Volume Manager and UFS). I have been aching for ZFS. And here it is!
Computer-naive friends who know I "work with computers" never ease from asking me to help them set up their home networks. That usually means hours of frustration with you-know-who's software. Until now I haven't really had the guts to propose Solaris-based solutions (because I know who would do all the sysadmin, right?)! But ZFS has changed my perspective. You see, although I've seen a few panics, I've never lost any data. And snapshots present all kinds of amazing possibilities for mitigating the frequent errors of naive users. And it's not just ZFS is it? Oh what fun we're going to have with FMA, Zones, IPfilter, and all that other OpenSolaris goodness! Over the last few weeks I've found an alarming number of people beginning to think the same things. Time to check the Cool-Aide? Maybe. Many of us have been spending hours dreaming up configurations, shopping around the web, and thinking how we might package solutions for ourselves, our family and our friends (and sleep at night)! So the time has come to pool all this goodness. Yet this is much bigger than building low cost, reliable NAS boxes for the home. So here's my proposed community page ... OpenSolaris Community: Appliances Welcome to the OpenSolaris Appliances Community! Solaris is no stranger to the world of appliances and has much to offer in this space. It has often been deployed as a key component in servers providing dedicated services (e.g. routing, firewall, naming, mail, web, media, storage, etc). Indeed, many businesses have been built around packaged solutions where Solaris plays a central role behind the scenes. Building useful appliances is about hiding complexity. The OpenSolaris Appliance Community exists to sift the enormous configuration permutations of hardware, application software and OpenSolaris itself, to provide low cost, feature rich appliances for all (especially for the home and the small office). Want to build a reliable NAS server for your collection of photos, movies and music? Want it backed up and secure? Want to build a robust firewall router with QoS capabilities? Want to build a mail server for your favourite charity? What to setup a mail server for your local school? Want to build your own TiVo? Want to know how to get OpenSolaris doing something really useful on the latest and greatest (or smallest) PC motherboard? ... Then you've come to the right place, and we hope that you'll stick around! Community Goals * Establish an active community building diverse appliances using OpenSolaris * Build a community of developers focused on making such appliances a reality * Form projects to develop tried and trusted recipes for building specific appliances * Leverage and aid the work of other OpenSolaris communities for better appliances * Have confidence in recommending OpenSolaris appliances to your friends and family * Low cost NAS appliances ... and freedom .. and so much more ... for all! Let's make it happen! Phil This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
