admin confusion and sma on OpenSolaris

When coming from a Linux world to OpenSolaris, there’s a wee bit of retraining required. The latest example I came across is configuring snmp on OpenSolaris.

snmp services on OpenSolaris are provided by a service called sma. To get snmp working on OpenSolaris:

$pfexec pkg install SUNWsmmgr

$pfexec svcadm enable sma

The configuration file is net-snmp standard stuff, but it’s concealed in /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf. After changing this file, restart sma:

$pfexec svcadm restart sma

OpenSolaris will now respond as normal to snmpwalk requests from your monitoring system.

By the way, pfexec is the OpenSolaris equivalent (roughly) to sudo on Linux. It allows you to execute commands as root. The first account created, by default, is allowed to execute pfexec against all OpenSolaris commands without requiring a password. A future note will tell you how to change that…

Music library management and SyncToy 2.0

I regularly switch between working on my desktop and my laptop. I also have an iPod. Because I’m most often with my laptop, I prefer to manage the iPod from there (Apple only lets you manage your iPod from a single computer). Music gets added to my library in an odd fashion—most often, I rip CDs on the desktop or buy from the Amazon MP3 store. Sometimes I do these things from my laptop. Often, this means that my libraries are disjointed. Tracks exist on the desktop but not on the laptop and vice versa. All of this has to get to the iPod somehow.

Enter SyncToy 2.0 from Microsoft.

SyncToy allows you to keep two directories in sync. It’s a simple, unitasking tool that does its job extremely well. Here’s how I use it:

1. I sync my Music folder from my desktop to my NAS box
2. I sync the Music folder from the NAS box to my laptop

SyncToy allows you to do a full sync where source and target are made the same. Files deleted from the source are removed from the target. Files added to the source are added to the target. Files changed on the target are also changed on the source. This means that the NAS music folder is changing based on additions made from either the desktop or the laptop. Those changes are reflected to both devices.

SyncToy has three operational modes:

• Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.
• Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.
• Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions are performed.

You may wonder why I bother with the NAS device. It’s possible to have SyncToy just keep the folders on the desktop and laptop in sync, but including the NAS box also gives me a full backup of my music library and makes it available (read only) to other devices in the house. I can stream music to my XBOX without having to have either the desktop or the laptop up and running.

Sometimes, simple tools are the best. SyncToy does one thing and does it very well.

Windows—Vista, 7 in a Unix world.

I’ve been working with Windows 7 on a couple of laptops for the last few weeks, and I have to say I’m liking it quite a bit. I also run Vista on my main desktop, so I can run some comparisons. The user experience on Windows 7 is much better. I know you’d like to hear that it’s more stable than Vista but I can honestly say I’ve not had stability issues with Vista.

Every day I spend considerable time with Linux and Solaris. Unix is my job and it’s been my career for 20 years. I have laptops that run Linux for a lot of the work I do on the road. I have a NAS box running Solaris. I have a desktop running Linux and MythTV. People ask why I feel the need to run Windows at all.

I have kids. They like games. There are some games I enjoy playing. The main desktop is a Windows machine just for the gaming experience.

I have clients. Some run Windows. There are, from time to time, sound business reasons to be running Windows…

OK. I’ve gone back and re-read that last sentence 4 or 5 times. I can’t keep a straight face. Let me rephrase:

There are, from time to time, clients who convince themselves that there are sound business reasons to be running Windows. I have to work with these folks. One of my primary areas of expertise is integrating Open Source solutions with Windows. LDAP into Active Directory. Unix based CIFS servers as primary data storage on Windows networks. Postfix as a gateway device into Exchange. That sort of thing. I have to be familiar with Windows or my job is harder than it needs to be.

Some Linux fanboys don’t get it. They speak out against Microsoft at every opportunity. They deride Microsoft’s products. They refuse to have anything at all to do with Windows. They have their reasons, of course, but I question the validity of those reasons. To complete exclude yourself from working with something simply because it goes against your grain limits your options. Better to know your enemy and know the ways in which you can make it better.

Good, fast, cheap—pick…all three?!?

It’s long been a saying in this business: You can have it good, fast and cheap. Pick any two. That’s beginning to change on many levels, and the changes are starting to ripple outward.

Sun Fishworks aims to bring large volume NAS and SAN storage down to commodity pricing. They’re combining a lot of their different technologies and playing on all their strengths—most notably, Solaris. By combining the power of Solaris with low cost hardware, Sun is challenging companies like NetApp. With any luck, they’ll be able to pull it off from a marketing standpoint—an area of weakness at Sun.

The Fishworks philosophy is a great one—do more with less. I brought this home by building a NAS server for the house based around OpenSolaris and the MSI Wind PC.

OpenSolaris is installed on a 4 GB Compact Flash card that sits on the Wind PC’s motherboard. There are 2 500 GB hard drives—one in the hard drive bay and one in the optical drive bay via a 5.25 to 3.5 adapter. There is no optical drive. In this configuration you can install OpenSolaris via a USB optical drive or, like I did, via a USB thumb drive.

Once installed, the two disks are placed into a ZFS pool and, in my case, mirrored. It’s amazing how flexible and easy ZFS is to manage, particularly with the power it gives you. CIFS is now an in-kernel driver on OpenSolaris and managed via ZFS settings. Sharing volumes and directories is easy. Even NFS sharing for the Linux boxes on my network is a no-brainer.

I’m still tweaking and testing system performance, but once I’m done I’ll do a full writeup on the system. So far, it’s good, fast and cheap. Not bad at all…

OpenSolaris on Levenvo Thinkpad T61

I’ve made attempts at installing Solaris on my Thinkpad in the past, with mixed success. I’m happy to report that, as of OpenSolaris 11.08, the installation is straightforward and almost everything works out of the box.

Go ahead and follow the procedures for installing OpenSolaris. Once the installation is complete, do a software update:

$pfexec pkg image-update –v

The pfexec command raises your privileges to root—like sudo in Linux. The -v part of the command will give you feedback on how everything is going. Once you’re done, you’ll have an entirely new boot image, courtesy of ZFS and snapshots. Next time you boot, your update OS will be the default option in GRUB, and you’ll be able to boot back into your previous, unpatched OS.

To enable suspend/resume, edit /etc/power.conf:

$pfexec vi /etc/power.conf

At the bottom, insert:

S3-support-enable

Save the file and run:

$pfexec pmconfig

On the next reboot, Suspend will be added as an option to the shutdown menu. Unlike other systems, you’ll have to press the power button to resume. In your Gnome Power Preferences, you’ll now be able to select Suspend as an option for “When laptop lid is closed:”

Wireless, including support for WPA, works out of the box. So does the nVidia card, including 3D acceleration and Compiz Fusion. The desktop is beautiful and performance is outstanding.

The only thing I’ve not got working yet are the softkeys for the volume controls. I’ll post an update when I get that sorted.

Sometimes, simple tools are the best…

Not just better, mind you, but the best.

When you’re forced to work on a Unix infrastructure on a Windows desktop, the very first tool you want is an ssh client. I’ve long used PuTTY for this. It’s an excellent tool and has all the bells and whistles that I need: certificate management, port forwarding, configurable terminal, screen support, etc. It has a couple of quirks that I don’t like, the most notable being that it stores its saved settings in the registry so it’s difficult to move saved settings from one machine to another. That’s not a show stopper, but as I’ve expanded my Windows work lately it became a real annoyance. I’ve been configuring multiple Windows machines for sys admin work and having to reenter the servers on every machine is a pain.

I took a look around at the state of Windows ssh tools and found a couple that looked really nice. I played around with them and enjoyed things like separate configuration files that are easily transportable. Some had built in scp clients. All were good, solid tools.

But I’m back to PuTTY. Despite not being updated since early 2007, PuTTY is still a solid tool. It’s memory footprint is small. It’s easy to install. It’ll run in a standalone USB key environment. There’s now a Linux version, though I’ve not used it. It just works. Every time. With no futzing about. It’s old, stodgy and very, very reliable. It is the best ssh client for Windows.

Two additional points: if you need scp, the PuTTY scp client works, but it’s not got a lot of features. Try WinSCP instead. Secondly, when is Microsoft going to get with the program and put an ssh client directly into the Windows shell? Being able to run “ssh -l 8080:remote:8080 -X somemachine.com” directly from the command line is, for me, more intuitive and easier to do. One of the drawbacks of being a crotchety old Unix admin.

Gentlemen, start your engines…

We’ve grown up, from a one man shop to a real live consulting firm. Up to now, all of our business has come about by word of mouth. Now we feel it’s time to:

1) Start showing off some of the work we’ve done.

2) Start giving back to the community that has helped us by documenting many of the things we do in a much more public forum so that others may take advantage of the things we’ve learned.

It’s my hope that you enjoy what we have to offer. The focus here will be Open Source tools. For the most part, we run these tools on Linux, but we’ve also helped clients out with OpenSolaris infrastructures.