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.
So, you want the stability and redundancy of ZFS. You also want to use Apple's Time Machine client but don't want to buy apple kit in order to backup your files. I'm using Opensolaris Openindiana in a JBOD setup to do this pretty easily. There are some good howto's on doing this on the net for Linux. This howto in specific for Ubuntu is located here. It's an excellent guide you can follow for doing the same on Opensolaris; Openindiana, however compiling netatalk on Opensolaris Openindiana needs some modification and there is an excellent howto on doing this here.
There are a couple of things to note. Opensolaris Openindiana uses it's own stack for mdns. When you get to the instructions on avahi you should not need to download or install this at all. There is a daemon called the avahi-daemon-bridge that essentially bridges avahi client calls for userspace clients like Ekiga that need it. So essentially you can skip that part of the instruction.
Opensolaris Openindiana uses SMF (Service Management Framework) to manage it's processes. So where you see things like "restart x process" in the guide you'll be doing something like "svcadm restart FMRI" where FMRI stands for Fault Managed Resource Identifier.
That's about it, note that you don't need to use AFP at all. You can also just install Samba via OpenSolaris Openindiana and create a share and have TimeMachine use that and it also works just as great!
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.