Photo Work

So, I’ve finally gotten to do some real contract type photo work! A friend of mine used some of my pictures for a website he was contracted to do – Blue Oasis Pet Care – and this has lead to another project he’s working on, for PetZone, a Dubai based pet store. I’m really quite impressed with both. Most of the pet stores in this country feel very… sad. PetZone is a lot more friendly, and I’d even feel ok putting a pet of mine up there in the kennel or cattery for awhile. And I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about the doctors (vertrinarians?) the Blue Oasis… but I digress.

My wife and I went out and shot nearly 1000 pics for the PetZone site, and now I’ve got to meet with the webmaster and with the client and work on the list of shots they want and do editing. There goes all my free time that I’m not using for packing!

Solaris Nevada – Build 101

Solaris Nevada build 101 is out. I mentioned in a post late last week that for the ZFS Snapshot feature to come preinstalled, you would need build 100 or higher. I forgot to mention that you would have to use the pkg image install utilities to get it.

Anyway, I’ve updated the original post with a better link to the Solaris Nevada download page – http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd/ – which takes you to the current build’s downloadable ISO’s. I wish all of Sun’s download links were this easy.

It’s official – we’re homeward bound

I’m leaving for the UAE forever. Again.

It’s weird to think that I’m heading back to the US for the last time (again), soon. I’ve already done this – I got the t-shirt and all that – and now, I’m doing it again. I hope this time around I won’t irritate my friends and neighbors as much with all my “wow it’s so green here” talk that I know rankled them last time. For anyone who’s missed the news, Charlotte and I are going to be parents soon! That was the motivator for moving, and then everything else seemed to fall right in line.

We should be back in the US right after Thanksgiving – I’m starting a new job on December 1st – but from some fairly silly complications in life, I’ll be headed back to the UAE in late December for a short visit to finalize the last paperwork and job details.

Who knows, I may be back again.

It’s coming

The Dubai and Abu Dhabi property markets are starting to correct themselves.

I thought everyone said that this market was impervious to the global credit crunch? They said that none of the slowdowns would reach the UAE, as there was such a strong economy here. Of course, what they forgot was that most of the buyers for property in the UAE aren’t UAE nationals – they are foreign investors trying to make a profit, many of whom have never been to the UAE. As their liquidity dries up, and as they try to move into more stable investments (t-bills, precious metals), they will take their money out of the market here. Which means no more flipping of properties here, and in turn means that the crazy monthly gains are going to go away.

I’m not saying that things here are going to crash, or even correct hard. What it does mean, though, is that rent should stop it’s ever-upward climb. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to find a studio in Dubai for less than 100,000 AED per annum.

Dropbox and ZFS

It may be gathered that I’m a fan of Sun’s filesystem ZFS, and that I really like DropBox. I’d love for the two to go hand in hand, but according to the forums, the Dropbox team hasn’t found a suitable Solaris interface for file updates – like the ones provided by fseventsd in OSX or inotify in Linux. I think with the snapshots available to ZFS, my one real concern of using Dropbox would go away: if a file is deleted from the Dropbox folder, it’s deleted from all clients. Sure there’s a version on the web that may be restorable, but if Dropbox doesn’t hang around long term or if there are network problems in the cloud, you can’t get stuff back. I think I’ve found a way to do all of this, and it’s really pretty simple.

All of the following assumes you have a file server running Solaris and ZFS, as well as a Mac or a Linux client that is associated with Dropbox. It also assumes your LAN connection is secure. (Yes, with NFS4 it becomes easier to set up IPSEC, but that’s an exercise left to the reader.) It also assumes you are either running a current build of Nevada or you have installed the zfs-auto-snapshot service. Here’s what I suggest you do:

1. solaris# zfs create -o sharenfw=rw tank/dropbox_client_sync
2. solaris# zfs set mountpoint=/dropbox_client_sync tank/dropbox_client_sync
3. osx-client# mkdir /dropbox_client_sync
4. osx-client# mount -t nfs fileserver_ip:/dropbox_client_sync /dropbox_client_sync
5. solaris# zfs set com.sun:auto-snapshot:hourly=true tank/dropbox_client_sync
6. solaris# zfs set com.sun:auto-snapshot:daily=true tank/dropbox_client_sync
7. osx-client# rsync -a -c /Users/username/Dropbox /dropbox_client_sync

All that’s left is to write a crontab entry or a launchd job for osx-client to rsync a few minutes after the hour, every hour. This way, the Solaris server will take a snapshot just before every rsync event, and you’ll have a safe copy of all your data – including major revisions – in case of disaster.

Of course, this doesn’t allow for the fine grained file recovery that the Dropbox web interface has – if you save 10 copies of a file between 9 AM and 10 AM, you only get one of those back on the ZFS side. However, this is a step in the right direction to make sure you have control of your data (and backups of your data) in multiple places!