My South

I'll write an article about configuration and possibilites of OpenStorage the next day(s), but as an appetizer here are two web configuration screenshots (click on them for original size):

First, the status dashboard, showing system/disk activity:

I am back after two weeks in Cameroon. At Zurich Airport "my" town was already shown at the display auf the airport train station - telling me that the frostiness is back.

It is snowing, people are silent, everybody looks down. They don't talk to each other, the white faces are showing a mix between frustration, boredom and unhappiness.
Ok, there are no thieves trying to aggress me, there's no ague (Malaria), there's no chaotic traffic and no "motivation money" or boodle as well - but there isn't a warm family, no beautiful women with their special smile and no lust for life either. Not to mention the extraordinarial food which we substitute here by industrial products.

I thought this time it will be easy - not as last year when I returned from Ivory Coast - but I was proved wrong. It's even tougher. I am back in frostiness - where all seems to pe perfect, where everybody's telling to me that I should be lucky because I am in Europe and I have all I need. But that's not true, I am cold. Frostiness is back.

1 Euro (EUR) has the value of 655,957 Francs CFA (XAF). This conversion rate is fixed.

The banknotes however differ:

Banknotes in central african states like Cameroon are issued by the banque des états de l'afrique centrale (BEAC).

The ones used in western african states like Ivory Coast are issued by the banque centrale des états de l'afrique de l'ouest (BCEAO).

It won't work to buy something in a central african CFA state with western states CFA money and vice-versa.

In Cameroon Orange (France Télécom) offers a "high speed" connection (with 512 kbit/sec download rate and 128 kbit upload) for 75000 CFA francs per month (approx 100 euros!).

A "Livebox" device has to be bought separately which is in fact a simple NAT/WLAN/DSL/Ethernet router. The Wimax antenna (which forms the primary internet interface) is connected to the ethernet WAN port - yes you heard right, here internet connections are done via Wimax - there are nearly no fixed lines at all in most of the parts of the country).

Turning the livebox on it flashes. I managed to take photographs of it (see above, click on the images to get bigger ones).

The Wimax connections works but roundtrip latency is between 350-400ms which is very high and noticeable. The livebox itselfs crashes often - once a day for sure :(

More on this tomorrow!

so answers to your questions will be delayed.

To all my dear readers:

I hope you will pass well to the new year 2010 and that your expectations, projects and lucky feelings will succeed in the new year!

Yours, Pascal

In Germany, we begin to celebrate Christmas at the evening of Dec 24th, as opposed to many other countries (celebrating Christmas due to Christianity).

On 24th, children get their presents which are put under a christmas tree, which is decorated with glass balls and (mostly electric) candles.

Dec 25th and 26th are national holidays.

What's that? From time to time I see this referrer in my log statistics. Which application is causing this? I found nothing on the net to solve this puzzle.

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In many of the entries this blog contains the topic lied on MPxIO configuration for fiberchannel storage links:

http://southbrain.com/south/2008/02/solaris-10-with-mpxio-scsi-vhc.html (for Solaris 10) or

http://southbrain.com/south/2009/09/sun-mpxio-storage-scsi-vhci-so.html (for OpenSolaris)

Now let's have a look into Solaris IP networking redundancy.

Just a note: Sun kernel patch 141445-09 (i86/amd64) and 141444-09 (SPARC) introduces zfs version 15 (zpool upgrade!), and the ::memstat-macro behaviour matches OpenSolaris:

Loading modules: [ unix krtld genunix specfs dtrace cpu.generic cpu_ms.AuthenticAMD.15 uppc pcplusmp ufs mpt ip hook neti sctp arp usba fcp fctl qlc lofs fcip cpc random crypto zfs logindmux ptm nfs ]
> ::memstat
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
------------     ----------------  ----------------  ----
Kernel                    2082351              8134   25%
ZFS File Data             3616346             14126   43%
Anon                      1125938              4398   13%
Exec and libs               11206                43    0%
Page cache                 961960              3757   11%
Free (cachelist)           286172              1117    3%
Free (freelist)            302471              1181    4%

Total                     8386444             32759
Physical                  8177548             31943


The xvm-3.4-source tree has obviously reached 3.4.2, as there is no more "pre", "rc..." or other suffixes in the version number.

After a svcadm enable milestone/xvm (and a reboot if you don't already booted the Xen Hypervisor) all daemons are coming up, it seems to work.

Windows 2008 R2 in a HVM identifies the BIOS as "3.4.2-xvm" (click on the picture on the right to enlarge it).

Windows 2008R2 and Sun Xen xVM? Yes it works. In Testsigning-Mode with the free GPL Xen drivers. Flawlessly. Performant.

To the right you see the result (click for original size).

The Xen Block volume (zfs volume in Dom0) is shown as "XEN PV DISK SCSI Disk Device", the virtual network interface as "Xen Net Device Driver".

To install Win 2008 R2 on Sun xVM begin to create a zfs block volume to hold the Windows boot disk:

The free GPL Xen driver files (which are perfect for Sun xVM) which can be found on

http://www.meadowcourt.org/downloads/

have changed their naming scheme.

XP drivers are named gplpv_xp_version.msi

2003 32bit drivers are named gplpv_2003x32_version.msi; actual version number is  0.10.0.138.

They'are also gplpv_Vista2008 (for Vista, 2008 and 2008R2 (only 64bit)).

A side note: To be able to use 64bit driver code on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 you have to turn testsigning on. Type as Administrator on the command line:

bcdedit /set testsigning on

reboot, install the 64bit drivers and your DomU Windows system will accept them.

With Nevada 128 you'll get zpool/zfs version 22 with new features.

A noticeabe new feature is named "deduplication" which means that identical blocks are only kept once on disk reducing real storage use.

pascal@denver:~# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool   135G  63.7G  71.3G    47%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
xvm     135G  29.3G   106G    21%  8.52x  ONLINE  -

The pool "xvm" has some nearly identical block volumes (zfs zvol) for Xen/xVM use and the result is noticeable.

Don't forget to allocate enough RAM to your Dom0-kernel when using Sun xVM.