Solaris

According to the solaris.reys.net access logs, most of my readers get my new entries using RSS. It's clearly seen that many visitors have already found what they are interested in, and read only the feeds of their interest instead of the general feed.

But what previously escaped my attention is that all of you RSS-readers of mine had no chance to notice any of the wonderful new features I'm constantly adding to the main side panel of my blog. This happened because I never even thought of mentioning any changes like this in my entries simply because I was assuming you'd notice yourself as I always try and put the most important content where it's clearly seen from any page of my blog. Turns out, without mentioning here in my entries, all these new features were only seen and used by the newcomers arriving from various search engines.

Today I've decided to amend this situation, and so I'm giving you a short list of new features on my blog:

1) There's an ongoing update of new blog categories. Right now, I have quite a few:

Hardware - probably the least active part of the blog for the moment. I haven't forgotten about it, but due to various reasons I had no chance to play with the latest hardware from Sun. That's going to change very soon.
Serendipity - this is the part of my blog about everything related to Serendipity blog enging - this is what my blog is running on
DTrace - one of the oldest and most popular categories of the blog, devoted fully to dynamic instrumentation in Solaris - DTrace
SMF - everything about Service Management Facility in Solaris
SysAdmin - a very new category where I put all the Solaris system administration tips and tricks from my daily activities
ZFS - another fairly new category, but already quite popular and promising one. This new file system interests me a lot, and in this category I give you all the experiments of mine in this field
Zones - this category contains my notes on Solaris Zones (sometimes referred to as Solaris Containers). In the nearest future this section of my blog will have massive updates, or maybe I'll just create a separate category called Brand-Z - about Solaris containers with Linux on x86/x64

All the RSS feeds links are always accessible from the main side panel of any page on my blog.

2) Useful links - here I have some of the links to various resources on the net I think you should pay attention to

3) Dynamic menu - at the top of any page we now have a dynamic menu, which allows you to quickly access the main page of the blog, the index, most popular entires, an archive and also has a link to the Russian part of the blog.

4) New features for feeds subscribers
Warning: all the links in this paragraph point to feeds of my blog and not the actual sites mentioned in the links.
I've added a blog feed of mine on FeedBurner - now users of this service can read me more easily. Also there are buttons for quickly accessing my blog from BlogLines and Yahoo!.

All this buttons, along with links to RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds of this blog, are to be found in the right top corner of any page.

I will do my best to keep you updated on any such changes in the future, but the general advise for you is to visit the main page of my blog - http://solaris.reys.net/english - at least fortnightly.

As I've mentioned already, my new server for the home experiments with Solaris has arrived.

One of the worries I had about it was the support of the on-board NICs of my Asus A8N-SLI motherboard.

So I'm happy to announce that at least one of the interfaces is fully supported and works just fine. I haven't installed Solaris on this box yet, but even the Solaris Express 2/06 boot CD automatically found and configured the nge0 interface, so I could stop the install, assign a proper IP to it and ping external networks.

At last, I've got my new Solaris server for home use delivered! Actually, it's not a server but separate hardware parts, so I'll be putting them together tonight.

It's going to be the following box:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2GHz
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium
RAM: TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB Dual Pack Kit

I've decided to buy new HDDs for this server later, I'll buy a few of them at the same time. This means that I'll use one of the drives I've got already installed in this box.

So far, things are looking up! I just hope that the on-board gigabit NICs are going to be supported by the nge driver, cause my motherboard isn't on the official hardware compatibility list for Solaris 10 just yet.

I'm considering getting myself an x86 server with Solaris for home use, and today I've decided to play around with ZFS on my old Sparc-box.

I believe those of you who are just getting started with ZFS will really like the -n command line option for zfs and zpool, which allows you to see what result would a certain command yield, while there is nothing actually done to your disks.

So, if you're thinking of creating a new storage pool, you don't have to actually create it just to see how it will look - you can use -n option instead:



The command will still be validated - its syntax will be checked, plus you'll have the existance of the disks verified as well. So, if you don't have one of the devices in your system, you might see something like this:

sun.com has a wonderful how-to on installing the Solaris 10 1/06 OS. The article contains plenty of screenshots and explanations, so it's very easy to follow. I was going to write a similar how-to myself, so this saves my time as I couldn't possibly do it better!

Here is the link: How to Quickly Install the Solaris 10 1/06 OS