Louwrentius

For those who are running Debian Lenny and want to order the new Dell R410 server, beware!

There is no safe solution to get Debian Lenny working with the on-board Broadcom network cards. A fairly recent kernel is required. Basically, you will have to install back-ported kernels, more recent modules and thus must violate the reasons why you were running Debian Lenny in the first place.

There is one solution, although it may not be an option: run VMware on the hardware and run Debian Lenny in a virtual machine. I think that in most cases, this will be sufficient for many cases and it has all the benefits of virtualisation and the stability of Debian Lenny.

It is unfortunate that Broadcom or Dell do not support Debian.

If you do have an easy and quite safe solution to get the Broadcom network cards working with Debian Lenny, please drop a note.

Beware though: the H200 and H700 RAID controllers are also not supported by Debian Lenny.

dell-s300-h200-and.html

Assuming that the rumor is true and OpenSolaris will be slain by Oracle, we must conclude that the Solaris operating system is obsolete. Solaris can be considered legacy. Sun was a hardware shop and to sell their hardware, they needed a great operating system.

Sun had a great operating system. And the Solaris platform was popular for a long time. And I think that was for the right reasons, at that time. If you or your company is still running on a Solaris platform, it may be time to rethink this strategy.

I do not understand why Oracle bought Sun. Oracle sells software. Sun sells hardware. Sun had some great products, like Java, so I can see some reasons. In the past, Solaris and Oracle had a tight relationship. But the only thing Oracle may be doing right now is a vendor lock-in strategy, where you are totally dependent on both hardware and software from Oracle.

But people don't seem to buy this, literally. People do want to continue to run Solaris, because thats the platform the've invested in. But they don't want to pay for those exotic Solaris Sparc systems, often way more expensive than commodity x86 hardware.

Oracle invested bilions in Sun assets. How are they going to make money of it? Squeeze out existing Sun Solaris customers who are depending on their platform?

If you are setting up a new business or if you think you can pull this off: stay away from this legacy platform. Migrate away from Solaris. Use an open platform that does not lock you in.

And this is also a very interesting read.

With the probable loss of OpenSolaris, there may be another, maybe more devastating loss.

The very popular and very advanced Zetabyte File System (ZFS)

The only open source platform that actively supports ZFS is FreeBSD. And they just 'copied' the code from OpenSolaris. Are they able to maintain and further develop ZFS on their own? I don't think the community can handle a thing like that. Development on ZFS will severely be hampered and will not continue in the pace it did.

It is also clear that Oracle doesn't give a shit about open source or open operating systems. That is ok with me, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But keep this in mind when you decide to use any Oracle product whatsoever.

It's not that I'm suggesting that you should not buy Oracle stuff. I have no grudge against Oracle in any way, it is just an objective observation, just be aware of this issue.

From the perspective of Oracle: what is their benefit regarding OpenSolaris? I understand their decision, but its sad nevertheless. And I'm really scared for the future of ZFS.

Storage is cheap. Lots of storage with 10+ hard drives is still cheap. Running 10 drives increases the risk of a drive failure tenfold. So often RAID 5 is used to keep your data up and running if one single disks fails.

But disks are so cheap and storage arrays are getting so vast that RAID 5 does not cut it anymore. With larger arrays, the risk of a second drive failure while your failed array is in a degraded state (a drive already failed and the array is rebuilding or waiting for a replacement), is serious.

RAID 6 uses two parity disks, so you loose two disks of capacity, but the rewards in terms of availability are very large. Especially regarding larger arrays.

I found a blog posting that showed the results on a big simulation run on the reliability of various RAID setups. One picture of this post is important and it is shown below. This picture shows the risk of the entire RAID array failing before 3 years.

From this picture, the difference between RAID 5 and RAID 6 regarding reliability (availability) is astounding. There is a strong relation with the size of the array (number of drives) and the increased risk that more than one drive fails, thus destroying the array. Notice the strong contrast with RAID 6.

Even with a small RAID 5 array of 6 disks, there is already a 1 : 10 chance that the array will fail within 3 years. Even with 60+ drives, a RAID 6 array never comes close to a risk like that.

Creating larger RAID 5 arrays beyond 8 to 10 disks means there is a 1 : 8 to 1 : 5 chance that you will have to recreate the array and restore the contents from backup (which you have of course).

I have a 20 disk RAID 6 running at home. Even with 20 disks, the risk that the entire array fails due to failure of more than 2 disks is very small. It is more likely that I lose my data due to failure of a RAID controller, motherboard or PSU than dying drives.

There are more graphs that are worth viewing, so take a look at this excelent blog post.

The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was scheduled for March 2010, but Oracle did not release anything. It is dead silent around OpenSolaris.

On 12 July 2010, the OpenSolaris Government Board sent out an ultimatum to Oracle: "please communicate with us or we will resign and hand over the little power we have back to Oracle".

These are all signs that OpenSolaris has no real future. And think about it: what is Oracle's interest in OpenSolaris? Maintaining an operating system and develop new features is extremely expensive. What is their benefit? I can't see any. Sun was a hardware manufacturer and promoting OpenSolaris made sure that people got experience with the operating system that powers their hardware.

Unless your environment already consists of Solaris-based systems, as of 2010, there is no reason to use Solaris any more. OpenSolaris was, until recent, the only operating system that supported ZFS natively, so the only choice if you really wanted to use ZFS. Now FreeBSD has native support for ZFS too.

For the people who are fanatical about ZFS this is great, because it would be a shame if ZFS could only be used in combination with a dead operating system that supports less hardware than Mac OS X.

But I see no future in OpenSolaris and you should think twice about running it, either as a production platform or at home. Use a platform that has a large user-base and a big community.

I think that if you are running OpenSolaris, you must start thinking about migrating to FreeBSD or Linux, however painful that may be.