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.