SUNWfrk’s Blog

Last month Slashdot reported that the UK Navy will switch their submarines from *nix to a customized Microsoft Windows because it would ‘safe’ money for the tax payers.
(source: Slashdot)

Now it seems they forgot to “keeping it safe”… because now they have a virus on the loose which led to shutting down some ministry of defence systems, most notably including admin networks aboard Royal Navy warships
(source: Slashdot)

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

Offcourse it comes down to two big innovations brought to you by Sun:

ZFS & Dtrace

The Fishworks team made a very nice gui wich combine the two and it is available in the newest Sun 7000 Unified Storage Systems.

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