I have two 1TB Maxtor basic drives connected to my opensolaris box. On there I run a ZFS mirror. All working well, maybe not on mega speeds but fairly enough for home use (it does stream movies to my AppleTV with XBMC over smb) The downside I discovered later, is that they auto sleep after 15minutes of being idle and I will tell you this, ZFS doesn’t like this feature… I fixed this with a crontab writing a tmp file in a directory on the disk but that gave me some unwanted problems in some cases. This morning I was fed up with it and I wanted a good solution and it seems, there is one… but the application doesn’t have a lot of functions when you use it on MacOSX it appeared… so you really need to do this on a windows computer (scary huh) so here is the application. Have fun!

I found this article from Simon Wheatley and found it very nice to do. But it didn’t seem to work on OpenSolaris… but don’t worry, it just needs a small fix, don’t use port 0 for _device-info._tcp, but just give it a port you are already advertising.
like:

<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=’no’?><!–*-nxml-*–>
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM “avahi-service.dtd”>
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards=”yes”>%h</name>
<service>
<type>_device-info._tcp</type>
<port>548</port>
<txt-record>model=RackMac</txt-record>
</service>
<service>
<type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
<port>548</port>
</service>
</service-group>

I found some info on how to share your OpenSolaris Screen with vnc, and those manuals just didn’t do it for Mac Os X unless you use a vnc viewer. But I wanted to use the build in screen sharing build in to Mac Os X which support vnc but it didn’t seem to work.. The resolution was Mac Os X wants authentication and thus the fix was easy, here you go:

svccfg -s x11-server
svc:/application/x11/x11-server> setprop options/server = “/usr/X11/bin/Xvnc”
svc:/application/x11/x11-server> setprop options/server_args = astring: (“-SecurityTypes” “Vncauth” “-RfbAuth” “/etc/X11/.vncpasswd”)
svc:/application/x11/x11-server> end

vncpasswd /etc/X11/.vncpasswd
chown root:root /etc/X11/.vncpasswd
chmod 400 /etc/X11/.vncpasswd

svcadm restart gdm

I found out gdm will go into maintenance mode after a while, so just do this when this happens

svcadm clear gdm

Now you want bonjour to pick this service up so add this to /etc/avahi/services/rfb.service

<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=’no’?><!–*-nxml-*–>
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM “avahi-service.dtd”>
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards=”yes”>%h</name>
<service>
<type>_rfb._tcp</type>
<port>5900</port>
</service>
</service-group>

and then restart the avahi daemon

svcadm restart avahi-bridge-dsd

and then you should have something like this

My macbook pro suddenly refused to write dvd’s. Offcourse you think your dvd writer is dead, but reading cd and dvd’s worked just fine.

The error I got was:

The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media

So I started to investigate and found out thanks to macosxhints forum it was a MacOS X software problem with a crazy and unbelievable fix which is the following:

Open System Preferences.
Click on “International”
Under “Languages”: Drag any of the other languages to the top,
then drag English back to the top.
Set “Order for sorted lists” to English
Set “Word Break” to English (United States, computer)
Close System Preferences
Restart computer (this seemed not necessary)

A response from Apple support stated:

Perhaps there is a communication problem somewhere so that the proper region code can not be determined.

Anyway, It works

Off-course you want to use timemachine now when you’ve set up your AFP server, I found everything whats needed in 3 easy steps on macosxhints.com.

on your local mac in Terminal type the following command.

hdiutil create -size $SIZE -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname “Backup of $HOSTNAME” -fs “Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+” -verbose ~/Desktop/$HOSTNAME_$MAC_ADDRESS.sparsebundle

$SIZE = the maximum size of the backups (example: 160G)
$HOSTNAME = the hostname of your mac
$MAC_ADDRESS = the mac address of your first ethernet card without the columns

now move that file you just created to the destination afp share you created for timemachine backups (with rsync, scp, mv,..)

now issue the following command in the Terminal if you are running a lower version than MacosX 10.5.2
You don’t need to sudo for this!

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

now to be sure restart your mac, (logoff and logon should be enough, but hey..)

You should now be able to select your afp share as a time machine backup location and even some say your backup can get corrupted but then you still have your zfs snapshots right? I’ll explain that later!

If your first question is ‘why not linux?’ is that I truly think Solaris is a better and more mature operating system. Solaris has native ZFS wich is still a major issue with the GNU part of linux. Solaris is also very ready for what you expect from a NAS and you can download it for free. Solaris has nfs, cifs, iscsi, snapshotting, raid protection directly built into it. I’m also a big Mac user so I also installed the mdns responder (howl) so now my Solaris server nicely shows up in the Finder and I can see my AFP shares which are protected with ZFS selfhealing.

The following link helped me cofiguring it:
http://www.tek-ops.com/archives/20

This link helped me further understaning the user management and setting up the right permissions on the directories:
http://users.phg-online.de/tk/netatalk/doc/test-afpd/

[update 2009/march/01] here a link howto compile on opensolaris

http://darkdust.net/writings/opensolaris/compilingnetatalkonopensolaris