Frame Dragging

Hard Work Pays Off.

Wed, 25 May 2011 10:53:16 -0500

The Challenge.
I was invited to participate in the Mississippi Technology Alliance’s New Venture Challenge. Yesterday I gave a 10 minute presentation on all aspects of the business, from the problem we solve, what makes us unique, how we plan to market our product, and financial projections. This was followed by a 3 minute Q&A session with the judges. In my category I competed with 14 other small businesses and walked away with second prize. This is my acceptance speech for the prize.

Very busy right now putting things together for the official opening of the US business, but hope to write more about that soon. For now, here’s a link to the company web pages: Axsh North America, Inc.

Safe and Sound and Thinking of Friends

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Memories of Tokyo
Japan was hit by one the worst earthquakes on record almost a week ago. We all knew it was coming sooner or later and practiced our earthquake drills. While living in Tokyo and Japan for nine years, I even experienced numerous earthquakes. They were sort of an accepted part of life and a bargain one made for living in such a wonderful place.

My thoughts are with my many friends in Tokyo and other parts of Japan. I’ve been trying to get in contact with most everyone I can, and know the friends, family and people I care about are OK. I can’t say they are doing fine and everything is alright because I know they are facing and will continue to face many hardships over the next few weeks. Some problems may even take years to get sorted out.

The photo here is of the fall colors on Mount Takao. My last few days spent in Japan last November were spent with family trying to fit as much as we could into a short time. I left the end of November and was back in Tokyo for about a week each month since for business and a bit of fun catching up with friends and spending time with my family who could not join me in November. We were working on selling the house, getting my wife’s US Immigrant Visa processed and conducting a bit of business in Tokyo.

Then almost a week before the earthquake, almost to the hour, my wife, my son and I boarded a plane for what we knew would be a long time away from our home. In fact the only home my son had ever known. It was very sad to leave, but we were going to a new place and a new chapter in our lives. None of us expected what would happen only one week after our departure.

I cannot wait until I get back to Japan again. I feel like I’ve left a part of myself behind. The country is so beautiful, and the people so gracious and kind. Japan will recover and rebuild, this is almost assured. It will not be easy, but I have faith and hope for Japan and the Japanese people.

My wife and I are working with the local Japanese community here in Northern Mississippi to coordinate some relief efforts from the local community here. They are sending Senbazuru which is a string of a thousand paper crane birds. It is usually sent to a person who is ill or injured as a prayer for recovery. The crane is symbolic of happiness and long life. The teacher of the Japanese Saturday School here in town is organizing this and they plan to sell each crane for a dollar. Everyone who buys a crane will be able to put their name or a message of hope to send to the people of Japan. The cranes and money will be given to the Japanese Ambassador in the US to aid the relief effort. It’s a small, but symbolic gesture, one of hope.

If you want to give to the relief effort, I would urge you to do so. Please donate to the International Red Cross who seems to be handling relief effort there rather efficiently.

Our thoughts are with everyone in Japan, we are all family.

I Went To The Meetings And All I Got Was This T-Shirt...

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:31:18 -0500

Change Dominates Life
As with the last blog entry, life is in a rather strange state of flux right now but I think things will be settling down to a steady state in the next few weeks. As with the last blog entry, I’d like to continue to point out to anyone who might be following my web site by RSS feed that I have a new version of my resume out. Please have a look at it.

Not All Work, Some Play
Got out to the Tokyo Solaris User’s Group Meeting, well really for the Nomikai which was the important part. Kato-san made sure I finally got my OpenSolaris Group Leader shirt. He and I continued discussing how we could involve more of the non-Japanese Solaris users and enthusiasts in the meetings. The classroom study has been put on hold, but we still have that planned on the back burner once I figure out whether I will remain in Tokyo or leave for some other port of call. It’s been a busy year of giving presentations, going to the various other Tokyo User community events, social and professional networking. All the while trying to promote OpenSolaris.

We’d still like to get the to get more of the ex-pats who use OpenSolaris or Solaris involved in coming to the meetings to learn more about Solaris and OpenSolaris as well as exchange ideas, culture and form a tighter community. The ex-pats who use Solaris have a lot of valuable experience, as do the Japanese group members. In the spirit of fostering communication between the communities, we will continue with plans to add a third study group who’s primary language is English centered around the OpenSolaris Bible as the text for the class. The study session will be open to anyone who wishes to attend, and the last 45-60 minutes of the session will be open for anyone who wants to present or give a talk about something interesting they’ve done, make community announcements. After that, there will be more cultural exchange and communication an the nomikai, nijikai, sanji....

There are a lot of cool things going on in the Japanese user community, but it doesn’t necessarily get communicated outside of Japan, and there are things going on in the international community which don’t always get translated or communicated to the Japanese community such as new White Papers, research projects and other cool aspects of computing. Our goal is to open the communication more and try to have some fun while doing it.

Looking forward to the next meeting and hope to see you there....

Putting Out a Fire With One’s Head in the Clouds

Tue, 6 Apr 2010 23:56:04 -0500

Fire Fighting - Your Life is on the Line
This is just a brief announcement to anyone who might be following my web site by RSS feed that I have a new version of my resume out. Please have a look at it.

I’ve been woefully behind updating my blog, but really so there has been so much chaos to deal with lately that there just hasn’t been time. When life gets back to some sense of stability, I’ll try to catch up with a number of projects I’ve been working on.

Lately I’ve been working on Solaris/OpenSolaris based HPC Cluster and Cloud Computing platform designs and implementation plans using research I’ve done into best practices. There are a lot of committees and players in this arena, a veritable alphabet soup of groups. The market is fragmented right now, but slowly standards are being agreed upon and published.

There are a few surprises here as well. Cisco considers themselves a Cloud Computing company, as does EMC. Also, one of the biggest providers of Cloud services, Amazon, doesn’t participate on any of the standards committees. This really surprised me due to their offerings of S3, EC2, and EBS becoming de-facto standards which cloud hosting providers must provide compatibility for their API’s.

A lot of really cool work has been done on this and when I get a chance I’ll post some of what I’ve learned, read, and designed, and hopefully started to implement.

Translating the OpenSolaris Bible into Japanese (Cancelled)

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:24:14 -0600

This Has Been Cancelled Since The Project Was Unable To Acquire The Rights To The Publication.

ZFS and NAS Presentation for Tokyo OpenSolaris Users Group

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:25:10 -0500

Saturday, I gave a presentation at the Tokyo OpenSolaris Users Group. My presentation was an overview of storage types, ZFS and my method for best setting it up for expansion and portability between system to avoid problems later. The presentation also included a live demonstration of setting up ZFS and connecting an OpenSolaris server to NFS, CIFS and iSCSI clients. The slides are available for download below.

For my demonstration and presentation I used a Mac Mini with 2GB RAM. I used two VirtualBox guests, one was the OpenSolaris “Server” and the other was a Windows XP client. Additionally the presentation was given in Keynote on the same machine. The machine held up fairly well under the load.

Jim Grisanzio was there and also a big help in organizing things as well as several of the other people at the Sun Microsystems office in Yoga, Tokyo.

Jim, an excellent photographer, even captured the moment in photos, available here.

The presentation is here in large (higher quality) and small PDF format.

TSUG-OSol-NAS-20090627.pdf 15.9MB
TSUG-OSol-NAS-20090627-small.pdf 3.3MB

The photo above is an iPod vending machine taken very quickly in the Memphis, TN airport. I’ve never seen a machine like this in Tokyo or any other part of Japan which is the home of all sorts of odd vending machines.

OpenSolaris Boot Environments - Freedom and Flexibility

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:44:06 -0500

Air Bags For Your System
Along with all the other cool things OpenSolaris brings along with ZFS and its snapshot ability, boot environments or be’s are a really nice feature built on top of the ZFS ability to snapshot and clone a filesystem. It is the ultimate airbag for those “oops” moments when something goes wrong with a patch or you wish to try something new out with the operating system and want to get the system back to a known state. They are also your best friend when trying to put together a demo and want to work out how to make it smooth, then roll-back the changes easily so you can do a fresh demo. Another use if for developers, packagers, and others who work at the system level and need to test out installation processes, system updates, or other system level functions. Boot Environments give everyone the ability to get the system back to a known point and the confidence to concentrate on the work necessary to deliver results rather than worrying about complicated back-out procedures.

In putting together a presentation on file systems, I built a virtual OpenSolaris machine in VirtualBox. I want to demonstrate the changes required for various type of file sharing such as NFS, SMB and iSCSI. To do this I also want to demonstrate the process of loading the required software packages. So, a little bit of practice and the ability to roll back to a known clean state is a very nice thing.

The first thing I did was to get a fresh install of the OS which is my core. The next thing I did was create anything I needed as a baseline configuration. Items like creating users, setting up a static IP address, filesystems, changing the state of any services in SMF, and any other housekeeping items to have ready at the beginning of the demo.

Next I create a “Baseline Configuration” boot environment which is a snapshot of the system at this point. It is now my master point which I can roll back to in order to get a clean system in a known state.

At this point, I check the /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst file and make any changes I want to there. This could be turning on or off the verbose boot mode of the kernel, or adding the graphic splash screen to watch during boot time. I prefer not having the graphic splash screen while booting as it may mask startup problems I want to know about.

I’m a bit superstitious, so after creating the new boot environment, I reboot the machine to test it. Things should be just fine, but I like to verify there are no problems.

After this boot, I create another boot environment which will be where I actually do the work. I call this one “undo-demo”. It is in this be where I install all additional packages, make system configuration changes and build the final system for the demo.

Once I’m finished doing anything for testing or demo purposes, I can simply boot from my baseline configuration (be00) and destroy the demonstration configuration boot environment (undo-demo).

The same idea can be applied to systems being used for testing in a lab to make changes, test procedures, install software or patches before going into production. This method of creating a live boot environment and a boot environment used as a rollback point can give you a great deal of flexibility in an operational capacity in that you don’t have to worry about rollback procedures as much and can actually concentrate on moving forward.

In a production environment, I’d use the same technique, but also rotate my be’s. In other words, when my new environment is stable and configured how I want it, I can create a new be which is my active environment. Then before I begin making changes to the system and depending on how much time has passed since I last created my live be, i would create a new be as a starting point and another as my rollback point.

Once things are how I want them, I can rename the working configuration to be my live or rollback configuration using the beadm rename command.

Putting It Into Practice
So, let’s take a look quickly at how this can be put into practice. The first thing I want to do is to get the baseline be and then a second be which will be my live working configuration. Of course, as always, the usual disclaimers apply...

root@spirit:/# beadm create -d “Rollback Configuration (be00)” be00
root@spirit:~# beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
be00 - - 18.27M static 2009-06-17 11:41
opensolaris NR / 3.16G static 2009-06-16 21:47
root@spirit:~# bootadm list-menu
the location for the active GRUB menu is: /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst
default 2
timeout 2
0 OpenSolaris 2009.06
1 OpenSolaris 2009.06 - Text only
2 Rollback Configuration (be00)
root@spirit:~# bootadm set-menu default=2
root@spirit:~# init 6

I used the bootadm command to set the default boot menu selection to be number 2. After rebooting, the system will start using the newly created be.

Immediately after start, I create another be on top of this one. The command sequence is pretty much identical.

root@spirit:/# beadm create -d “Working Configuration (wk00)” wk00
root@spirit:~# beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
be00 - - 18.27M static 2009-06-17 11:41
opensolaris NR / 3.16G static 2009-06-16 21:47
wk00 - - 77.0K static 2009-06-18 22:36
root@spirit:~# bootadm list-menu
the location for the active GRUB menu is: /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst
default 2
timeout 2
0 OpenSolaris 2009.06
1 OpenSolaris 2009.06 - Text only
2 Rollback Configuration (be00)
3 Working Configuration (wk00)
root@spirit:~# bootadm set-menu default=3
root@spirit:~# init 6

Now my working configuration is where I will install my software, and is my working copy. Once I’m happy, I can then use beadm to destroy the “rollback configuration” and rename my working configuration to be my new baseline configuration.

If anything goes horribly wrong in the process, I can simply boot the rollback configuration, destroy the working configuration and repeat the above process to create a new working be.

A Smooth Upgrade - OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111b

Fri, 5 Jun 2009 04:58:43 -0500

So earlier this week the new OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released in conjunction with CommunityOne in San Francisco. The new stable release of OpenSolaris snv_111b is hot off the presses and is getting good reviews. It was actually selected as a release candidate the week before, but I’m sure Sun wanted to promote it during the CommunityOne festivities. I’m a two days late with this entry, but better late than never.

Upgrade The Server
My home NAS server I’ve been using for quite a while which I just migrated to OpenSolaris 2008.11 was doing just fine, but I wanted to have the latest build as I intend to try building OpenSolaris from scratch in the next few weeks and wanted to be up-to-date. After all it took me a year to get migrated to the latest version a few weeks ago, so I figured, why wait this time.

The upgrade was a snap. However, the usual disclaimers apply when doing this as when doing anything as root. Usual disclaimers apply, please read “the fine print.”

I went to Sun’s web site and found the section on upgrading an existing install to OpenSolaris install 2009.06 and it really couldn’t have been simpler. Before trying this out on my live server, even though be’s (boot environments) and zfs rollback works like a charm, I built a virtual machine in VirtualBox and installed OpenSoalris 2008.11 just to be safe. I did the following from the command line:

‣ pfexec su -
‣ pkg install -v SUNWipkg
‣ pkg image-update -v
‣ init 6

That’s it and I’m now up and running the latest version of OpenSolaris 2009.06.

I have to say it did take a little bit of time due to the extra load the Sun servers were having to deal with due to the enthusiasm of people wanting to upgrade and download. I did add the “-v” option for verbose because I wanted to see what it was doing while it was doing it and it gave me something to watch during the upgrade. In all, it took about 30-45 minutes due to slow response times and load on the servers.

One side note, I’ve only found one problem with the upgrade, but it was simple enough to fix and didn’t notice it until today.

root@spirit:/# man pkg
windex entry incorrect: pkg(1t) not found.
root@spirit:/root# catman -w &

This is easily fixed by issuing a catman -w to rebuild the whatis database.

UPDATE: 10 June 2009 - Did find one more things which needs to be done after upgrade. Any disk pools you have will most likely be on a lower version of ZFS. I only noticed this because I wanted to scrub the disks after a less than graceful shutdown and checked the status of the pools. Very easy to take care of using the zfs upgrade command.

root@spirit:~# zpool status rpool
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format. The pool can
still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done, the
pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c5d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors
root@spirit:~# zpool upgrade
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 14.

The following pools are out of date, and can be upgraded. After being
upgraded, these pools will no longer be accessible by older software versions.

VER POOL
--- ------------
13 rpool
13 xpool

Use 'zpool upgrade -v' for a list of available versions and their associated
features.
root@spirit:~# zpool upgrade -v
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 14.

The following versions are supported:

VER DESCRIPTION
--- --------------------------------------------------------
1 Initial ZFS version
2 Ditto blocks (replicated metadata)
3 Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z
4 zpool history
5 Compression using the gzip algorithm
6 bootfs pool property
7 Separate intent log devices
8 Delegated administration
9 refquota and refreservation properties
10 Cache devices
11 Improved scrub performance
12 Snapshot properties
13 snapused property
14 passthrough-x aclinherit support
For more information on a particular version, including supported releases, see:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/version/N

Where 'N' is the version number.
root@spirit:~# zpool upgrade rpool
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 14.

Successfully upgraded 'rpool' from version 13 to version 14

Pools are then updated. So simply:

• Check the pools on the machine: zpool upgrade
• Check the ZFS versions available in your installation: zpool upgrade -v
• Upgrade and repeat for each pool: zpool upgrade poolname

A Couple Of Extras
I’m very much a command line person and have been for a long time. I’m not particularly fond of GUI’s, I don’t like watching the little orange bar moving across my screen while the system is booting. Bad things sometimes happen during this process and you can be stuck staring at the graphical boot for a very long time. So, when I’m booting, this is what my /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst file looks like. My changes highlighted in blue:

splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
background 215ECA
timeout 5
default 3
#---------- ADDED BY BOOTADM - DO NOT EDIT ----------
title OpenSolaris 2008.11 snv_101b_rc2 X86
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive
#---------------------END BOOTADM--------------------

title OpenSolaris 2008.11 snv_101b_rc2 X86 text boot
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -v -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

title opensolaris-1
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive
#============ End of LIBBE entry =============

title OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111b X86 text boot
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -v -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

Notice, I’m using the 4th boot entry (indicated by “default 3”, the first is “0”) and I also don’t like waiting so I set the timeout on the GRUB screen to 5 seconds which is plenty of time to select something else if I need to. Also, I’ve added the “-v” verbose option to the kernel so I have something to look at while it’s booting. It just gives me a warm feeling to see the machine “doing something” at boot and this is a “headless” server most of the time anyway.

In all, I’m very pleased with how smoothly the upgrade went. Many thanks go out to everyone who helped build, test and package this great operating system.

Get OpenSolaris 2009.06snv_111b now.

Tokyo OpenSolaris User’s Group Meeting - 30 May 2009

Sun, 31 May 2009 08:23:00 -0500

Yesterday I went to the Tokyo OpenSolaris Users Group meeting at Sun’s office in Yoga. The room was packed with many people all enthusiastic to learn more about OpenSolaris. It was an all day affair lasting well into the evening as the meeting moved on to “nijikai” down the street. Good food, good people, and nice exchange of ideas.

Had to get this gratuitous shot of our host from Sun Microsystems, Jim Grisanzio’s laptop covered with Kitty-chan stickers courtesy of his daughter. Jim has a large collection of laptop photos from various meetings like barcamp, and other meetings.

I was invited to give a presentation on ZFS, Home NAS, and a bit about using ZFS for backing up OS X using iSCSI.

It was very nice to see this much interest in OpenSolaris. The room was full, hopefully we’ll see as many or more at the next meeting. I am really looking forward to attending the next meeting, hopefully we’ll need a larger room.

Future plans, for meetings would be to have the Tokyo Linux and BSD communities meet for some sort of bake-off, or joint presentation. The Sun facilities are nicely suited for this sort of meeting. Several people are working on coordinating this. I’ll post more information here as I find out more, but am really looking forward to this as well.

More photos of the event may be found in my gallery, and on Jim’s OpenSolaris blog, as well as his Flickr pages.

Enjoy the photos!

ZFS File System Layout - Just A Couple Of Suggestions...

Thu, 28 May 2009 10:14:42 -0500

So Much Disk, How To Organize?
As I began mapping out my storage for my home NAS, I started trying to think about flexible file system configurations. During my upgrade and migration efforts, I started to run into some of the limitations of ZFS, in particular the handling of rpool and its relative inflexibility, to the rest of what ZFS offers as a whole. I wanted to come up with a way of making things as flexible as possible, eliminate potential conflicts created by moving storage from one system to another when the pool names might collide as they did when I migrated an existing rpool to a fresh installation.

I also wanted to incorporate other things into the mix as well. Things like backup areas implemented with CIFS, NFS, or iSCSI. I wanted traditional shared NAS for user files as well as large data sets like audio and video. Zones were also a consideration since I want to isolate the host operating system from the functions of any special type servers such as web, application, and infrastructure services (NTP, DNS, LDAP, etc.). Also, these special servers shouldn’t be tied to a particular fixed domain like the host operating system. So, my goals were fairly clear-cut and defined at this point.

This is a 10,000’ overview and I won’t even begin to touch on mount point for this discussion...

Configuration Goals
‣ Reduce The Impact Of rpool Configuration Inflexibility
• Must be no more complex than a “simple” mirror
• Cannot be increased in size
• Placing other file systems in rpool make those other filesystems harder to move at the pool level
‣ Core/Base Host OS Isolation
‣ Special Purpose Sections (zvol)
• swap
• iSCSI
• Raw for Database
‣ Traditional NAS
• User-based File Storage
• Group FIle Storage
• Common Shared Storage
‣ Structure and “Control Points” for File System Properties
• “Artificial” File Systems
• Property Setting Inheritance
‣ Flexibility for Zones and Other Virtual Hosts
‣ Importation of Potentially Conflicting zpools

This diagram lays out what I think to be a reasonable best practices template for ZFS file system organization. One item missing here is an area specifically for databases, either raw or “cooked”. These could easily be worked into this structure however, and I may add to this later, moving the “data” control point to the same level as “export”. Beneath that point we could then put database file systems directly under that point, or place two additional control points for raw zvol type database data, and another for file system based database files.