Switching Up The Main Page Again

I’m going to be switching the photoblog and the text part of this blog around again – so the photoblog is what loads when you land on http://www.gurucollege.net. The old address for the photoblog will still be valid – http://www.gurucollege.net/pix/, and the text part will move to http://www.gurucollege.net/blog/. I’ll be making this change as soon as I have a free hour or so to troubleshoot – probably on the afternoon of the 1st or the morning of the 2nd. I wanted to give everyone some fair warning about the move, so they have a chance to update their bookmarks.

DNS

DNS is critial for the proper functioning of LDAP, ActiveDirectory, OpenDirectory, EMail and SSL, and to a lesser extent, things like Apache. There’s a bit you need to know about DNS as a server administrator, and things you need to know working in IT. Here is what you need to have a self contained system – and it’s easier than you think.

I’m using MaraDNS, on an Ubuntu VM, inside of VMWare Fusion. Simple configuration, simple management, lots of speed, and a measure of security. To get a basic recursive DNS server running, all you need is a 3 line config file, and to host a domain, a pair of config files (one of them 4 lines, the other as few as 1 line). And yes, it really is that easy to run a DNS server. I’ve got mine setup at home already, using the domain homelan.lab as to not have it confuse my home network with the internet.

Merry Christmas

Just wanting to wish everyone a very merry Christmas!

Fake Thumper Redux

I mentioned in my first Virtual Data Center post that I was setting up a “Fake Thumper”. It’s been pointed out to me that it’s really not needed, and somewhat foolish to do things that way. It would be a good way to stage a production environment – as long as you don’t use more disk space than you actually have. For example, to make a true Fake Thumper, you’d make 48 x 500 GB virtual disks. However, the mkfile -n trick I had been using doesn’t work well in VMWare – my ZFS pools kept on corrupting themselves. So, I’ve just attached 3 x 20 GB vdisks, and added them. Seems to be working just fine. The great thing about ZFS is the fact that it scales – I can easily create another 3 20 GB disks in VMWare, add them as another set, and my pool has grown to 80 GB.

The fun part begins, though, with this entry on the OpenSolaris CIFS server page – the 4 command version of getting the in-kernel CIFS server online for doing windows-friendly file services.


#svcadm enable -r smb/server
#zfs set sharesmb=on tank/files
#echo "other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn" >> /etc/pam.conf
#passwd testusername


And with this, you get snapshot capable file services. One more command, and the same shrepoint is available over NFS – just use “sharenfs=on” in the 2nd line of the config. This, of course, doesn’t cover the process of binding to Active Directory – I haven’t gotten that far into this setup yet to have or need AD.

VMWare Fusion It Is

VMWare Fusion wins out over Parallels. It’s by no means perfect, but I am able to get Solaris Nevada (B77) installed – which is a big start. I’m really hungry to start playing with the in-kernel SMB server, as Mac OS X doesn’t yet support iSCSI natively. I’m really looking forward to a day that I can build out a physical server with plenty of drives to host all my files and store time machine backups, but I know it’s going to be awhile. Probably going to have to wait until I’m back in a house again – there’s just not enough room in an apartment for the kind of goofing off I want to do with it.

But I digress. VMWare Fusion has got some problems. I’ve got some issues when using one of Apple’s new slimline keyboards in that the F-keys stutter and repeat a lot if you’ve got the keys working as their function equivalents (Sound, Dashboard, Expose instead of F1, F2 etc). Further, the “mkfile -n” trick fails pretty miserably with ZFS, yielding an un-mountable ZFS pool – which I assume is due to the fact that I’m using the self-expanding virtual disks, and something’s just gotten munged.

The other thing that prompted my decision – Ubuntu Server just works. No need to replace the kernel, it just works. And works well. That’s about the end of it.