Elektronkind

mercury.elemental.org is the server which hosts my $HOME and this website. It’s my Solaris 10 play-box, and I guess you can say that maintaining it is something of a hobby.

Its hardware is a quad core Xeon-equipped Dell PowerEdge 860, a small 1u server. Its pair of internal drives are Seagate SATA2, and were connected to the on-board Intel ICH7-based SATA controller. But there was something fishy about this in that the Solaris ahci SATA driver never attached to it and instead the drives ran in IDE mode. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t change this. I eventually found out the reason - Dell crippled the SATA controller in the system BIOS to allow only IDE mode!

So this server was sold with “SATA drives”, which would imply a fully functioning SATA controller to drive them… but not quite. IDE mode means there were no benefits of SATA NCA and other niceties.

To fix this, I got a LSI SAS3041E-R controller - a 4x PCIe card that uses the LSISAS1064E chipset and offers 4 SATA ports. In Solaris land, this card would be driven by the mpt driver, a proven driver as the LSI SAS 1064 and 1068 chipsets are used to drive the on-board hard drives in pretty much every current Sun x86 and Niagara-based SPARC systems.

I installed this card in the single 8x PCIe slot in the PE860, and ran a 24″ SATA cable from it to HDD1, and used the existing Dell cable that connected the on-board controller to HDD1 to connect HDD0 to the card. After some fiddling in /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc to tell the kernel the new device path to its boot drive, the mpt driver attached and I was good to go.

I kicked off a SVM mirror resync as a basic test of sequential IO, and I hit 75MB/s reading from one drive and writing to the other. Not bad. A zpool scrub of my mirrored ZFS pool of 66.5GB of data (pool is 444GB in size) took just over an hour.

So if you’re thinking about a 4 or 8 port SAS/SATA card, consider the LSI SAS3041 or SAS3080/3081 cards, respectively. Both come in PCI-X and PCIe flavors and are supported by Solaris (and OpenSolaris) just fine.

/usr/X11/bin/scanpci output:
pci bus 0x0001 cardnum 0x00 function 0x00: vendor 0x1000 device 0x0056
LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1064ET PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS

Kernel boot messages:
scsi: /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0 (mpt0): Rev. 8 LSI, Inc. 1064E found.
scsi: /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0 (mpt0): mpt0 supports power management.
pcplusmp: pciex1000,56 (mpt) instance 0 vector 0x38 ioapic 0xff intin 0xff is bound to cpu2
scsi: /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0 (mpt0): mpt0 Firmware version v1.17.2.0 (IR)
scsi: /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0 (mpt0): mpt0: IOC Operational.
scsi: /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0 (mpt0): mpt0: Initiator WWNs: 0x500605b0000fa840-0x500605b0000fa843
pcie_pci: PCIE-device: pci1000,3090@0, mpt0
genunix: mpt0 is /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0
scsi: sd4 at mpt0: target 4 lun 0
genunix: sd4 is /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0/sd@4,0
genunix: /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0/sd@4,0 (sd4) online
scsi: sd3 at mpt0: target 5 lun 0
genunix: sd3 is /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0/sd@5,0
genunix: /pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci1000,3090@0/sd@5,0 (sd3) online

This past weekend the X crew and I went up to Adventure Sports Center International’s artificial whitewater course, near the Wisp Ski Resort in western Maryland.

We had a lot of fun and I brought along my new Canon lens, the 70-200mm 2.8L, to see what I could do with it:

Full image set

Posting these for posterity:

Time Magazine - When Your Name Isn’t Yours
Wired - Burners Sweat Over Package Prank

Many reviews have been written about OpenSolaris since its release, but all of them barely tread beyond the desktop aspect, with the obligatory screenshots of the GNOME environment and a high-level description of only the major features most are already familiar with, or at least have heard of.

I’d like to take a different approach with this review, one that descends below the GUI to highlight aspects that server administrators in particular would be more interested in.
Read the rest of this entry »

I took this photo of the 1st half Moon while at the April 10 HAL star party at Alpha Ridge Park, Maryland.

Although I’ve taken many photos through my telescopes, I really consider this one to be my first “real” astrophoto, having gone through the motions of equipment setup, settings selections, and a bit of post-processing in Photoshop CS3 for this one shot of the moon.

These two books - Michael Covington’s Digital SLR Astrophotography and R. Scott Ireland’s Photoshop Astronomy - lent me a big hand in teaching me what to do before and after taking a photo or series of photos of an object. I highly recommend them.

I accidentally left my trusty 3rd gen 40GB iPod on the plane when I arrived in San Francisco yesterday, so I headed to the Apple Store around the corner from my hotel in downtown SF to treat myself to a new 160GB iPod Classic. I happily bought a silver one, and headed back to the office to christen it and put some music on it.

Apparently I got a lemon :(
Mar 11 15:27:47 cobalt kernel[0]: disk3s2: I/O error.
Mar 11 15:27:47 cobalt kernel[0]:
Mar 11 15:28:14: — last message repeated 1 time —
Mar 11 15:28:14 cobalt kernel[0]: disk3s2: I/O error.
Mar 11 15:28:14 cobalt kernel[0]:
Mar 11 15:28:34: — last message repeated 1 time —


… and on and on… eventually after spending 2 hours syncing only 47 songs (out of 940) did iTunes figure something was wrong and proceeded to beach ball.

Time to see how easy it will be to exchange this one.

I’ve started a project of my own to port the HFS/HFS+ filesystem driver from Apple’s XNU kernel to OpenSolaris/Nevada.

Hopefully this will work well enough to allow Solaris users to read and write to HFS or HFS+ formatted disks and disk images. This includes iPods that were initialized on a Mac. Please check out the page I made for it and lend a hand if you’re interested!

Technorati Tags: solaris, opensolaris, sun, mac, macos, apple

I’ve been really quiet with the astronomy-related blog posts over the past year, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve been straying from the hobby of amateur astronomy - far from it. I’ve signed up with two local clubs and have been brining my scopes out to star parties (or just my back yard) whenever I can.

Up until recently my only two telescopes have been a Orion XT10i, a 10″ dobsonian, and a Coronado PST for viewing the Sun in Hydrogen-alpha wavelengths. This past holiday I treated myself to a new scope, a 90mm apochromatic doublet refractor made by William Optics (WO) named the Megrez 90.

The Megrez 90, as the name implies, is a high-quality refractor telescope that uses calcium fluoride optics. The objective lens is 90mm in diameter and the scope has a focal length of 621mm, which means it has a focal ratio of f/6.9. When WO brought this scope to market, it took it by storm as it was quickly regarded as a high quality instrument at an astonishingly low price, easily comparable in optical quality, fit and finish to long-standing fonts of quality such as TeleVue and Stellarvue.

I found the reviewers to be spot-on with their assessment of this telescope’s construction and features. Its dual-speed (10:1) Crayford-style focuser has made me wish I had it on my big Orion XT10i. The stars are beautiful pinpoints with no detectable (to me at least) chromatic aberration. I have only spent a few nights outside with this ’scope so I don’t have a full feel of its capabilities… more on that later. But I will say that I have been impressed so far and would at least offer it as a suggestion to anyone who is looking for a telescope in its class.

Along with the telescope, I purchased WO’s EZTouch alt/az mount and wooden surveyor’s style tripod to put it on, as well as their Red Dot Finder instead of a classic finder scope. I found with my XT10i+Telerad that I prefer to star-hop to my target rather than bungle around inside a restricted FOV.

I foresee many nights out under clear skies with this fine instrument.

Technorati Tags: astronomy, refractors, telescopes, william optics

With a bit of sadness, yesterday marked my last day of work at UMBC where I spent the past 3½ years learning lots of new things. It’s where I developed my deep interest in mass storage and furthered my Solaris knowledge even more, where I delved into kernel programming by participating in the OpenAFS project.

I learned a lot about people there, too, and how different sectors of the IT industry just have sometime inexplicably different mindsets about how to do things. Coming from the .com world to the .edu world was a bit of a whiplash event for me then having grown up around profit-based and customer service-centric organizations. I know I did leave UMBC with some lasting friendships and deeper appreciation skill sets in other people that I gave barely a thought to before.

Onward and upward, I transition to my new job and re-enter the .com world. On Monday, I start with Salesforce.com and will focus on storage (and Solaris) there. It’s an exciting opportunity for me and I’m sure I’ll be immersed in the technology and tasks I enjoy. I’ll work with a top-notch team in helping to keep SFDC at the forefront if its industry. Good times ahead!

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, umbc

After almost 8 years of running elemental.org mail, mailing lists, shell accounts, many websites (such as this one), database servers and essentially being a one-server ISP, the Sun Ultra 2 which ran all those things as lithium.elemental.org was retired and replaced this past weekend with a new server. Say hello to mercury.elemental.org.

Mercury is a Dell PowerEdge 860 with a Intel Xeon X3220 (quad core, 2.4Ghz) and 4GB 8GB of 667Mhz DDR2 RAM. Unlike lithium, mercury’s storage is entirely internal in the form of two mirrored 500GB SATA drives. This is to keep the entire package in 1 rack unit of space to keep colocation costs down.

What really excites me about this new server is that it is running Solaris 10 8/07 (lithium was running a very patched Solaris 8 FCS!). Solaris installed without a hitch and the 860’s onboard BCM5721 NICs are recognized by the bge driver, as are its IPMI baseboard controller by the bmc driver. The chipset on this system is the Intel ICH7 and unfortunately the Solaris ahci driver supports only the ICH6 at the moment, so the drives are running just fine in IDE compatibility mode.

This upgrade wasn’t just a mere update of hardware and OS. I also completely changed how the mail storage works and also make use of ZFS file systems for each user home directory and virtual web site:

1. Out with uw-imap, in with Cyrus. All mail is delivered to Cyrus, so there are no more maildir-style spools sitting in each person’s home directory.
2. To take advantage of Cyrus’s features, elemental.org is now operating its own Kerberos realm, ELEMENTAL.ORG. This is my first time running my own Keberos KDC, and I love it. Cyrus and Sendmail, via SASL, now offer GSSAPI authentication. Using Solaris’s pam_krb5_migrate.so.1 PAM module, as people log in with their UNIX passwords, a Kerberos principle is made for them and they are granted tickets. Pine is configured to connect to Cyrus and authenticate with GSSAPI, so shell users don’t have to type in or save their password when accessing their email!
3. As I mentioned, all user data is now stored on a mirrored ZFS pool. Each user and virtual website gets their own ZFS file system and this will allow me to keep tabs on disk usage (and easily delete a user or site if the need should arise.) The zpool’s net size is 442GB.
4. All incoming email is goes through greylist, ClamAV, and finally SpamAssassin milters.
5. I’m more at ease and familiar with Solaris’s SMF facility now, having made a point to write SMF manifests for the services I’m running rather than plain old init scripts.

In addition, I’m now monitoring several aspects and services on the new system using Cacti.

Here’s to another 8 years of hopefully trouble-free operation!

Technorati Tags: Sun, Dell, Solaris, ZFS