opensolaris

Learning Sun Solaris at the Sun Open Learning Center

I admit I have become intrigued with OpenSolaris and Sun Solaris. Sun has made it extremely easy to get started learning these two operating systems with their Sun Open Learning Center.

The SOLC is free to use for just getting a Sun account. The curriculum at the beginner level include Desktop Components, File Systems and Directories, Working with Process, Working with the Shell and Archiving Files and Remote Transfer.

The SOLC includes an intermediate level which is currently in beta. The curriculum here includes Intermediate Booting SPARC and x86 Based Systems, Installing Solaris 10 and Safely Shutting Down a Solaris System. Sun promises more to come at this level.

You can also join the Sun community at the Solaris Campus at Second Life. Here they have various times setup for “live” classroom learning via the Second Life application.

According to Sun the curriculum should prepare you for a Solaris Certified System Administrator. I have taken the first course as was quite impressed with it although it is at very beginning level.

The application works beautifully walking you through the subjects and giving you some brief tests at the end to check your learning. The course takes some time to get through so you will probably need to shutdown or close your browser before you are done. When you log back into the application it will ask you if you want to start where you left off. You can click yes and go directly to the lesson where you stopped. If you need to back up a few pages for review and start from their just click the back button.

Given the cost of certification materials and classes this is a giant step for Sun, should help them get more certified admins, while taking it easy on your wallet. You should go try one of the courses today.

-j

Testing the ZFS filesystem with OpenSolaris, FreeBSD and Ubuntu

I recently ran across a test that Phoronix did comparing Ubuntu, OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. While the test covered many areas the one that got my attention was the performance of the ZFS filesystem compared to ext3 and UFS. You can see the test results here.

If you are looking for a high perfomance file system this is clearly the way to go. The tests were measured in operations per second. In every case the ZFS filesystem from OpenSolaris out performed the ext3 filesytem by significant numbers.

Here are some partial comments that I got from an article Ten Reasons to Format Your Filesystem

A 64-bit filesystem would meet today’s need, but estimate of the lifetime of a 64-bit filesystem is about 10 years. Extending to 128-bits gives ZFS an expected lifetime of 30 years (UFS, for comparison, is about 20 years old). So how much data can you squeeze into a 128-bit filesystem? 16 exabytes or 18 million terabytes. How many files can you cram into a ZFS filesystem? 200 million million

ZFS employs 256 bit checksums end-to-end to validate data stored under its protection. Most filesystems (and you know who you are) depend on the underlying hardware to detect corrupted data and then can only nag about it if they get such a message. Every block in a ZFS filesystem has a checksum associated with it. If ZFS detects a checksum mismatch on a raidz or mirrored filesystem, it will actively reconstruct the block from the available redundancy and go on about its job.

And from the OpenSolaris site:

ZFS provides built-in compression. In addition to reducing space usage by 2-3x, compression also reduces the amount of I/O by 2-3x. For this reason, enabling compression actually makes some workloads go faster.

There is much more to the ZFS file system that I can put here. If you are looking for a scalable high speed file system that has self checking and healing for corrupt files then the ZFS filesystem is worthy of your consideration.

-j

Inventory tracking with the Sun Inventory Application

Sun has a unique application on their web site called Sun Inventory that will track hardware, software and operating systems. It is unique in that it is, more or less, a cloud application. You can access your inventory anywhere that you have internet access.

The Sun Inventory application tracks these items by installing a small application on the machine that you want to inventory. Initially it will report back the hardware and operating system. As qualified applications are installed the agent will report these back to the Sun Inventory application without any interaction on your part.

Getting started is simple. Go here to get started. If you don’t have a Sun account go ahead and sign up. Once you are signed in it is a 3 step process to get started.

Step one is to download what are known as service tags. This is the application that you will install to “tag” your inventory so that it can be put into the application. Tags are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Enterprise Linux, Solaris and Windows. Download the appropriate tag for your operating system and install it on the machine on which you want to inventory. The tagging also works on Virtualized Machines from Red Hat Virtualization and from VMs using Virtual Box. I didn’t check any other virtualization applications.

Steps two and three are discovering and registering your “gear” as Sun calls it. This downloads a small java program onto your machine to help in finding and registering tag ready machines. With this application you can find your machines in various ways such as hostname, subnet and ip address. Below is a screen shot of the information that you can use to find your tagged your machines.

Once you have done this a screen will pop up showing the gear that the registration client found. You will then login to your Sun Account and choose which products that you want to register. Once they are registered what you will see is like the following screen shot.

As you can see I have my 1u server tagged along with the host and virtual operatings systems. The OpenSolaris machine is running on Virtual Box. The OpenOffice application was installed after I tagged and registered the machine. Since the tag runs as a service it picked up the OpenOffice application and registered it as part of the OpenSolaris machine.

This is a great way to get your machines and related software inventoried and get control of it.

-j