Trying out Opensolaris 2008.11

I’m cycling through servers , and thought I’d try something new. Previously, I’ve generally used Centos and other Redhat derivative systems as home server, as I’m used to the RPM package manager. Recently there’s been a lot of buzz out there about OpenSolaris. Most of this revolves around the ZFS filesystem, which has an amazing feature set, and can implement high end data integrity functionality in software without high end hardware RAID systems underneath it.

To facilitate this, I bought a Dell PowerEdge SC440 when they were really cheap ($199 base), and with a small processor and RAM bump, it’s actually a fairly solid server. It uses the Intel 3000 chipset, with a ICH7 Southbridge which has 4x 3.0Gbit SATA connectors. It should also be able to take 8GB of RAM, assuming Dell didn’t hobble the chipset – they claim a 4GB max. If you’re looking for a server, this isn’t too bad a choice – if you’re an AMD fan the Dell T105, with it’s optional quad-core Barcelona (Phenom class) Opteron also looks pretty good.

I downloaded a prerelease version (101, rc1b) version, which boots to a live CD and then allows you to install the base system. It’s a very nice install process, and fairly painless. I had no trouble installing on one disk, adding a mirror to the root ZFS pool, and updating on the system, but beyond that I started running into walls.

Apparently, in this version, zfs list by default only shows filesystems and volumes, and not snapshots, unlike every other example I’ve seen from documentation or on the web. To list snapshots as well, you have to use zfs list -t all for everything or zfs list -t snapshots for just the snapshots.

Transferring a files from my Mac and Linux computers was easy via NFS with the zfs set sharenfs=rw rpool/example. I was slightly perturbed that there were no firewall changes required to do this, as I’m used to secure by default systems like CentOS or OpenBSD.

I still don’t really get SMF as Sun’s replacement for init scripts. It seems to only be implemented halfway in this release – you’d think they would go through the system and get rid of all their legacy boot scripts (as Apple did when they developed launchd), but apparently not.

For being a company focused on Web 2.0 developers, I’ve had more trouble trying to get their website working than with any other vendor – here’s an error I got when trying to log into the OpenSolaris Forums. I also had to enter the same login information twice to get to the error:

Picture 5.png

The OpensSolaris install documentation is sufficient, but doesn’t go much beyond updating the system. You really have to look around for documentation – here’s a few links I’ve found so far:

That all said, it’s a well running, stable system. I’ll post more as I work with it.