As a followup to my
previous post, I now have my database server running on
Solaris Express svn_28. It has been running for a little over a week now.
I was not able to use my original disk partitioning scheme. One of the 18GB drives would not disklabel. I suspect that it has odd firmware since it originally came from an HP disk array. The other, otherwise identical, 18GB drive labeled without any trouble.
I decided to just pull the 18GB drives and use them on a OpenBSD system since they have worked under OpenBSD in the past.
I ended up installing the OS on a 8GB slice on one of the 73GB drives. The rest of drive 0 and drives 1 through 3 are part of a ZFS pool running RAID-Z. Unfortunately, that leaves my OS volume rather exposed.
Yes, I have a ZFS pool made up of a partition on one drive and 3 whole drives. I assume that I'm incurring a performance penalty for mixing it up, but it hasn't caused any problems yet. I cannot recall reading that you are allowed to create uneven RAID-Z pools, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Postgres is currently running in a zone. It (postgres) is being managed by SMF. No problems with Postgres yet, but I'm going to be throwing 2GB of data into it later tonight. I'm looking forward to seeing what that does to the system. Postgres is using a filesystem on the uneven RAID-Z pool for storage.
I finally plugged in and reset the RSC card. Also, I'm using IPF on the global zone to filter traffic for all the zones.
And that is all that is going on with my experimental database server.
Rad Decision tells the story of a nuclear power plant and associated workers from construction through disaster. I discovered and read it early this morning.
It provides a good look at the benefits and risks of a nuclear power.
Unfortunatly, it does not seem to be getting much publicity.
Off to bed now. I have to be at work early for a Motorola marketing (bleh) presentation. My guess is that they are introducing a
mesh version of the
Canopy system.
Mini rant:
Motorola has a nice low-chipcount board that they use in all their Canopy products (except for their 45Mb backhaul,
IIRC that came from Orthogon.) So far, they have been using it for point to multipoint
TDD networking. Apart from the size of the integrated antenna, all their radios are identical.
I'd love to see them make better use of their fixed-wireless software radio platform, so hopefully any mesh system will use their existing hardware design.
They recently introduced Canopy Lite subscriber modules which are identical to their normal SMs with the exception that they are speed restricted in software. This introduces a fascinating possibility. Why can't they sell bare hardware and let us buy feature (
SM,
AP,
BH, Speed) licenses over the web as needed?
We have already determined that the software loads and hardware is identical across all those favors. You can get keys to increase bandwidth on the access points. Virtually everything is in place except for the online store.
It looks like I will be rebuilding my database server sometime this weekend. The drives that I ordered off eBay came in today. It will now have 18GB for the OS and 200GB for the database. It will also have an additional ~180GB from a
HDS 5800 if I can find a FC HBA that actually works.
I've been very pleased with
Solaris 10. That said, I don't want to deal with
SVM RAID5 (4x
ST173404LC) when ZFS is around the corner. I just don't have enough disk space to use for temp storage if I need to restructure my filesystem.
I'm going to try the latest Solaris Express since it has
ZFS. Hopefully the next stable release of Solaris 10 (06/06?) will come with ZFS. If it does, I'll happily use it for the next several years.
Here's to
Postgresql + Solaris 10. It rocks.
So far, the year has gotten off to a slow start for me. I am taking the semester off from school as I need to pay up before I can take more classes. Well, that and I don't need to take any of the classes that CS is offering this semester.
Work is progressing slowly, as usual. I nearly have a fee-based hotspot system built using
m0n0wall and RADIUS. Other than that, I have been improving our monitoring and management systems.
I baked
O'Reilly scones last night. They turned out to be delicious, which surprised me since they were my first try at baking.
You could be reading this page over IPv6 thanks to HE.net's
tunnel broker and a unused Cisco 3640 at work. Yes, I'm playing around with IPv6 again. I am using
Freenet6 at home. It is too slow to do much, but I can SSH to my home systems without having to deal with NAT and port forwarding.