[geeks] Thoughts? (Cheap NAS with nice feature set)

[Joshua Boyd]

On Apr 4, 2008, at 9:21 PM, Alois Hammer wrote:
>
> And, really?  In a case where HA isn't a priority, I'm more worried
> about power-suck than I am having dedicated boxes for NTP, DNS, and
> other core services.

Of course if your NTP server was one NSLU2, and DNS was another, then  
your have significantly reduced power, and separate boxes that should  
easily be able to handle any load you would generate from inside the  
apartment.

>> Nope, as far as I know, OpenSolaris keeps SMF.  It isn't hard to  
>> fumble
>> your way through.  Mostly you just place the files that you would  
>> have
>> put in /etc/init.d in a new place, copy and paste a few lines in  
>> an XML
>> file, then run a command that you've written in your notebook because
>> you don't do it frequently enough to remeber.  Oh wait, that's me.
>
> Okay.  I'll give it a shot when my virtualization host is up.

BTW, for many common services, you can find pre-made XML files such  
that you wouldn't only need to edit the paths in the XML file.

So, for IMAP, I use dovecot.  I have a file that is just a shell  
script that takes arguments like start, stop, and refresh, just like  
a /etc/init.d/ file does.  The main difference is that the file goes  
into /lib/svc/method instead.  Pretty silly.  I guess I could put the  
file anywhere if I wanted to edit paths in the XML file, but I  
couldn't putting that much effort into fighting the system.

In the XML file, most of the lines are about listing dependencies.   
If you want all the benefits of SMF, then you have to worry about  
listing these out.  Sometimes I got sick of it and just left in:
                 <dependent
                         name='imap-dovecot_multi-user'
                         grouping='optional_all'
                         restart_on='none'>
                                 <service_fmri
                                     value='svc:/milestone/multi- 
user' />
                 </dependent>
which tells it to start the service (IMAP) only in multi-user mode.   
For all the files I had to create (postfix, mysql, dovecot, possibly  
others that I'm forgetting) I either found a pre-existing files that  
required little to no modification, or pasted together a minimal  
one.  I got all of that set up in virtually no time.

svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/site/imap-dovecot.xml
that is the command to tell SMF about the new XML file you handed it.

I forget if the service starts right then or if some svcadm enable  
command is required.

On the upside, because of all of the dependency listings, it can  
parallelize startup to some extend.

BTW, for file server usage, I found that the performance of my E250  
really jumped when I moved from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 an UFS to ZFS.