Jason’s .plan

Coming soon…

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Tomorrow (05/28/2008) I'm giving a talk on moving to open storage (i.e. ethernet, OpenSolaris and SATA…in no particular order) at the Diocesan Information Systems Conference in San Antonio. It's a closed event, but here are the slides from the talk…including the talking notes which cover a lot more than I'll probably have time for:
PDF
Slideshare
DigiTar, DISC, [...]

As a company that was heavily populated with Linux zealots, it’s been surreal for us to watch OpenSolaris develop for the past 3 years. While technologies like DTrace and FMA are features we now use everyday, it was storage that brought Solaris into our environment and continues to drive it deeper into our services stack. Which [...]

Nearly a year has passed since our descent into the 9th ring of latency Hades, and I wanted to make an update post on ZFS' interaction with SAN arrays containing battery-backed cache. (For the full details, please check out this older post.)
For one thing, the instructions I previously gave to ignore cache flushes on the STK [...]

NRPE (Nagios Remote Plug-In Executor) is a critical part of a lot of IT environments. In ours it provides to Nagios all sorts of interesting health info local to the host that NRPE is running on. Whether its RAM, open connections, hard drive space or something else, NRPE helps alert you to strange happenings that [...]

One of the quiet parts that powers our logistics infrastructure is PowerDNS. Its a very powerful way to serve DNS records that you need the ability to update programmatically. Unfortunately, OpenSolaris (or Solaris 10 for that matter) isn't exactly considered kosher over in PowerDNS-land. Like a lot of OSS projects, PDNS hasn't kept up with [...]

NOTE: ZFS has been enhanced to better address the situation described below by using ZFS configuration directives. This article is still accurate and provides decent background on the problem. However, an update has been posted with the newer, stronger, better way of resolving the problem: Back in the sandbox…ZFS flushing shenanigans revisited.

Running operations [...]

Currently, we're putting the N1400Vs into production and there were two odds and ends that came to mind that I wanted to mention:

No client/server settings per port! Hooray! The Alteons (even the 2424s) inherited from the Alteon AD4s and 184s the need to enable client and/or server processing per port. For those who are not [...]