Christopher Warner Studies and thoughts, usually in coherent fashion.

6Mar/110

OpenIndiana ZFS Server

Recently I had to upgrade the hardware for my research server due to a massive hardware failure. The failure itself hasn't been diagnosed properly but turns out it was essentially a ram failure of my OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 modules or a chip failure. The near loss of all of my research data and work had me in a slight panic. Luckily getting new hardware got me up and running and everything worked out fine.

Specification Pepsi Openindiana Build 148

The machine is named 'pepsi' and consist of the following hardware (all prices are current as of 03/22/2011):

* This item is to be part of a refactor meaning that this was originally built for my needs but one doesn't actually need 750 Watts for power and can get by with a 200-250W power supply. Also not included is the price of the 4 hard drives as these are what I had in the original pool. In this case a sufficient comparable HD should do and not fall to far out of bounds in regards to power requirements.

Software wise we have:

A couple of things to note here on the machine build. The BIOS for the D510 Intel NM10 needed to be upgraded to the latest version as the board I ordered and received was almost a year behind in updates. Newegg did get the delivery to me within 1 day of ordering however which was blazingly fast considering. The fans were ordered because the case comes with a 120 and 140mm fan. The 120mm fan isn't that loud but the 140mm fan has blue leds, which I simply have no tolerance for. The D510 mini-itx board itself is amazingly small and includes a mini pcie port that I can eventually stash a mini pcie wireless card in.

Also, the Vantec 6-Port has 4 internal sata ports and 2 external ESATA ports. It's powered by the SiS 3114 raid controller which is basically some hodge podge mess onboard. They provide a straight-through IDE BIOS upgrade for the chipset available from the Silicon Image manufacturers website. You will need this if you want to use this chipset under OpenIndiana primarily because it doesn't automatically detect this chipset otherwise. Moving from sata to ide may mean no hot-swap but I haven't necessarily tried this yet. I'll update after I hook up another 4TB store, i'm moving the data around now as we speak.

Luckily my custom board wasn't damaged and all of the data on disk were fine. I am currently not at liberty to discuss the custom add-on board but hopefully i'll remember to revisit this post when I am.

Normally I only buy ECC ram however to keep cost low and because I had verified my data wasn't severely damaged, I have foregone the option for this machine. After some burn-in time I will most likely upgrade to an ECC ram module.

Before the hardware failure the most critical and important pool was my research pool which was a RAIDZ 1TB zfs pool. After installing OpenIndiana and setting up netatalk which now supports Time Machine backup I simply did a zfs import -f poolname and was back in business.

19Jan/110

Plone and div blocking

Excuses

I haven't written any functional tutorial or such for Plone in a while. I'm working on a paper involving openid and started some work on an introduction to object and dynamic publishing that I need more time to work on, have random other things moving and etc excuses here. Something quick and useful in the meantime I suppose.

What is div blocking?

Div blocking is what I'm calling the process of returning a CoookedBody() back to your template into a specific html div. It's not specific to plone and it's a simple and straight-forward method many Plone developers call on. The idea is that you want to be able to return a section of html back into your overall template using a "Page" or "Document" content type. A simple use case for this is when you want to allow content-editors a chance to change something in the overall webpage using the standard Plone page content type. No sense in creating a new content-type just to return some formatted structured text. The end result is that you would like the final rendered html from that page to fit in-between <div></div> tags and for the overall look to leave your layout alone.