OpenSolaris is dead

OpenSolaris is dead. Now, time to find a migration strategy away from OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Snapshot Love

I love snapshots. The ability to do something like this warms my heart:

1. Shut down all VMs
2. Turn off VMWare
3. zfs snapshot tank/Media/VM@`hostname`-`date +%s`
4. Turn VMWare back on
5. Boot the VMs
6. Schedule the movement of the snapshot to the backup host while you are doing development work on the images you just saved

The only thing that could make this better is if I had a separate ZFS dataset for each VMFS (so I could snapshot them individually), and if I could trigger the snapshots from VMWare. Yes, VMWare Fusion has internal snapshots, but I’ve not found them all that reliable. And I’m thinking of moving to VirtualBox anyway – my ZFS snapshots live until I migrate off OpenSolaris. (Which I hope never happens).

More Drives Dying

Over the weekend two more drives in my main ZFS pool started throwing errors. I just replaced a drive in the array, so I will get a ‘new’ drive to replace a failing one in a few weeks. However, the pool is a raidz1, which means there is only one parity drive. A two drive failure will toast the pool. This leads me to think I should beef up my backup server – which isn’t quite large enough to keep all the data from the main server. After I have a full backup, I’m tempted to convert my main tank to a raidz2 – which would allow two drives to fail simultaneously.

It’s only a couple hundred dollars to get it where it needs to be.

OpenSolaris 2010.03

I’m looking forward to the release of OpenSolaris 2010.03. Among other reasons – a stable dedup engine, a simpler automated installer process, and most importantly for me, built in drivers for the dual gigabit NICs on my fileserver’s motherboard. This means I can either leave the Intel NIC in place, and have three dladm aware NICs, or move one over to my development box, Thor, which is currently running on 10/100.

I really hope Oracle doesn’t decide to kill off the OpenSolaris project. It’s doing me wonders. But with recent moves they have been making, I’m not so sure.

skipfish

Here’s another tool to add in, along side nikto and nmap – skipfish, an internal Google tool, hosted on Google Code. It’s written entirely in C++, and compiles cleanly on Snow Leopard (after libdin-1.18, which also installs cleanly).

Running the full tests against my Nagios VM took about an hour – and pushed about 4GB of data over the network to the VM. The report is comprehensive, and found two places where I’d forgot to validate my inputs for SQL inserts – which would allow for SQL injection attacks. This is very handy, and I’m going to keep it in my arsenal of security tools.