c0t0d0s0.org

After a long time i found time to integrate all the typo and error corrections provided by Ceri Davis into the main LKSF document. Thus i´ve updated the document today. You can download it at the usual location at c0t0d0s0.org. I´ve added the kssl tutorial, too.

There is a new version of Virtualbox available for download fixing some issues, so 2.2.4 is now the most current version. You will find a changelog at the projects website. Download at the usual location.

One of the nice things with Solaris is it´s stability under extreme load ... as shown by this blog post:

I’m always amazed how well Solaris can handle heavy load:

# uptime
8:09am up 111 day(s), 4:08, 5 users, load average: 3293.29, 2549.46, 2400.75

Yes, the server is still running fine and, albeit a bit slow, still responsive. Want to try that with your generic Intel/Linux box? Good luck.

Es ist soweit. 28.6.2009 um 11:36. Die Petition gegen Netzsperren hat 100.000 Mitzeichner. Ich finde das grossartig, das sich so viele Leute in einer solche Sache mobilisieren lassen. Zu diesen 100.000 muss man auch noch die Leute rechnen, die sich schriftlich an dieser Petition beteiligt haben.

Ansonsten: Ich habe auch aus anderer Richtung Hoffnung geschöpft, das sich diese Netzsperren noch verhindern lassen. Im Rahmen der Anhörung am 26.Mai gab es zwei Stellungnahmen, die das Vorhaben ziemlich demontieren. Das ist zum einen die Stellungnahme von Frey sowie die Stellungnahme von Bäcker. Interessant ist auch die Stellungnahme von Herrn Schaar, der darauf hinweist, das Teile des Vorhabens schon alleineaus datenschutzrechtlicher Sicht verwerfenswürdig sind.

Ich bin da guter Hoffnung, das spätestens das BVG diesen Wahnsinn wegen offensichtlicher Schwächen des Vorgehens stoppen werden. Nur schade das mal wieder die Verfassungsjudikative die Welt retten muss.

Nichts destotrotz gilt: Weiter mitzeichnen. Diese Sache ist wichtig. Je mehr Stimmen sich Gehör verschaffen, desto eher wird man vielleicht einsehen, das dort ein so wenig zielführender Weg beschritten wird, anstatt das Problem wirklich an der Ursache zu lösen

Brendan compared the 7310 and the 7410 performancewise in his blog. The results were really impressive:

Workload	7310 Result	7410 Result
NFSv3 streaming read from DRAM	~1.08 Gbytes/sec	~2.02 Gbytes/sec
NFSv3 streaming read from disk	780 Mbytes/sec	1.20 Gbytes/sec
NFSv3 streaming write to disk	~477 Mbytes/sec	~595 Mbytes/sec
NFSv3 read IOPS from DRAM	180,000 IOPS	281,000 IOPS

I want to agree with Brendan - 1 GByte/s is a great result, especially when you consider, that this box wasn´t a fully blown 7310. Just one socket was filed with a CPU. I´m curious how far a fully blown system would go ...

I've uploaded a new version of the ZFSviz script. You can download it here. There are some significant changes in this version:

• an included README file with some documentation
• Snapshots created by timeslider aren't part of the visualisation per default. In case you want so see those snapshots, you can add -a show to your command line.
• You can specify the the properties for a dataset you want to show in your diagram. You can specify different set of properties by using -v for volumes, -s for snapshots and -f for filesystems. The names of the properties are the lowercased properties in zfs get. Multiple properties are seperated by commas. For example -v type,creation to print out type and creationg time for volumes. The default for every type of dataset is type
• The non-standard perl modules needed to run this script are included in the tar-ball. Thus you don't need to install modules from CPAN to run this script on Solaris 10. This is the reason, why the format of the download is a tar.gz
• You can specify the location of the output file with -o
• Automatic detection of the OS, so it uses the correct zfs list command on Solaris 10.

The Sun Storage 7000 family got a new member. There were many customers, where a 7410 was a little bit large, but needed the cluster functionality (a feature missing at the 7110 and 7210 mandated by their design, you can't failover when the storage is in the head). So there was quite a demand for a smaller 7410. The Sun Storage 7310 was made with this demand in mind. Will help to stop some discussions at the customers.

The most important feature: You can put the 7310 heads into a HA cluster. They are smaller than the 7410 heads, so you "just" put 2 Opterons in them, not 4 The head is based on a 2-socket, 1RU server with 8 drive bays (2 used for boot disks). Thus you can add 6 SSD for read-acceleration via L2ARC per node (600 GB per node, 1.2 TB per cluster). 64 GB memory (it's used mostly as a DRAM cache for the filesystem). You can attach up to 96 TB of disk storage. Featurewise the system is equivalent to the others system, as it use the same software. System prices starts at $40,140 list price, all software features included.

You will find additional informations at the Sun Website: sun.com: Sun Storage 7310 Unified Storage System

Neelakanth wrote a nice summary (with the reasoning) of Mysql-on-ZFS tuning tips for Innodb databases: MySQL Innodb ZFS Best Practices

There is an interesting presentations made by Peter Dennis about the new features in OpenSolaris 2009.06 at wikis.sun.com. The slides were made for the Community One.

Eine der Fundamente der Kritiker von Netzsperren ist ja, das die Sperren ein wenig probates Mittel ist, um diese Perversitäten loszuwerden, sondern das die Entfernung das Ziel sein muss. Der Arbeitskreis gegen Internet-Sperren und Zensur hat jetzt gezeigt, das dies mit erstaunlich hoher Effektivität geht: Löschen statt verstecken: Es funktioniert!.

Looks i'm the only one who doesn't want to celebrate my birthday today. I'm visiting friends and family at the next weekend and will celebrate with them. But everybody so far was somewhat puzzled about my comment, that i'm not planing anything for today....

So ... this is a first version of the ZFSviz script. Sorry for my bad coding style, but i'm not a developer. Didn't knew my perl knowledge was that rusty ....

To execute this script you need two things not available on a plain vanilla Solaris system. You need the Tree::Simple library (perl -MCPAN -e 'install Tree::Simple' should do the trick) and an installation of GraphViz on a system. The perl library has to be installed on every system you want to use the script. The GraphViz software is just needed on the system you want to use to render the output of the ZFSviz script. GraphViz is available at sunfreeware.com, at blastwave.com or at opencsw.org.

Okay. After copying this script (obviously you have to strip the .txt and chmod the file) to you system, you need to assume a role or a user that is capable to execute zfs get and zfs list (root will do the trick). This version of the script won't work on Solaris 10. You have to modify a line. You must substitute $zfslist_command = "zfs list -H -t all -o name,origin,type"; with $zfslist_command = "zfs list -H -o name,origin,type";.

I've implemented two modes of operation. The first one is the basic mode. You can use it with zfsviz.pl -m basic. It's a simple overview of the ZFS datasets. A blue ellipse is a snapshot, a green hexagon a volume and a black rectangle a filesystem. A red arrow is a cloning dependency.



(click on image for larger version)

The verbose mode yields an overview with more data, but you need a much larger display or printer It prints some additional information about each node. In this version, it's just the creation time but at the end this script is already capable to deliver all informations available by zfs get all. So a zfsviz.pl -m verbose should yield something like this:


(click on image for larger version)

The color coding is the same as with the basic output. But the ZFS objects are presented in a different way to display the properties of a file system.

The script doesn't render the images at it own. It uses GraphViz for this task. After executing the zfsviz.pl script, you will yield a file out.dot. The name of the file is hardcoded at the moment. You have to feed it to your GraphViz installation with dot -Tpng out.dot -o out.png. This will provide you the nice graphics.

Hope that this script is of help for you