We’ve also produced a short comic, with our very own hero, Nexentaman, to walk you through NCP. Click below to read the comic.

The Adventures of Nexentaman

Links

Nexenta homepage: http://www.nexenta.org

Artwork and Wallpapers: http://www.nexenta.org/os/SpreadTheWord

IRC : #nexenta on freenode

Go ahead, test drive Nexenta, and spread the word

There were weeks of speculation of a buyout by IBM, which generated loads of discussions on the opensolaris forums. The biggest fear was IBM buying Sun, and killing off competing products. Sun and IBM competed on many fronts.. Opensolaris vs AIX, Eclipse vs Netbeans, Mysql vs DB2, Power vs Sparc, etc.. not to mention the server hardware market.

Sun’s price-tag was nothing to IBM.. it could’ve bought Sun out with a week’s revenues. The talks fail, Oracle swoops in, and grabs Sun. A /. comment sums it up..

Shadow of the rings

The cool thing about this particular picture is not the big shadow running down on the rings. It’s the shadow of the smaller particles that form the white ring towards the center.. if you notice closely, thay cast a shadow on the next set of rings.

Watch the entire series of images here.

On a related note, I’m reading Arthur C Clarke’s Rama series..

Opensolaris has had the capability to share an iscsi target for sometime. This was done in the userland via the iscsi target daemon.

The COMSTAR project on opensolaris was started to build a fast scsi target on the platform. From the project page:

COMSTAR is a software framework that enables you to turn any OpenSolaris host into a SCSI target that can be accessed over the network by initiator hosts. COMSTAR breaks down the huge task of handling a SCSI target subsystem into independent functional modules. These modules are then glued together by the SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF).

COMSTAR provides

• Extensive LUN Masking and mapping functions
• Multipathing across different transport protocols
• Multiple parallel transfers per SCSI command
• Scalable design
• Compatible with generic HBAs

With intergration of COMSTAR to ZFS, Nexenta Core Platform provides for very easy setup as an iSCSI target. These latest changes to ZFS are available both in the latest beta2 release of NCP, as well as the commercial NexentaStor v1.1.5.

How to setup a NCP2 box as an iSCSI target

First, shutdown older iSCSI target service, and start the new one

svcadm disable -s iscsitgt
svccfg delete -f iscsitgt

Also if you have any zfs volumes with shareiscsi=on, set them to shareiscsi=off. This is required to setup the new zfs integrated scsi correctly.

Enable iscsi/target and it’s dependency

svcadm enable -s stmf
svcadm enable -s iscsi/target

Install the switch by creating the file:

touch /etc/shareiscsi.conf

Now create a dataset (volume) which is to be shared via iSCSI

zfs create -V 500m tank/zvol1

Using -V creates a volume type dataset, and it reserves the given amount of space on the pool for it’s data. In our case we reserved 500 Mb of space for our volume zol1. To create an SCSI target using this, simply run.

zfs set shareiscsi=on tank/zvol1

And we’re now set :). To confirm that the target has been configured, check that output of

itadm list-target -v

Performance gain

This implementation of an iSCSI target provides 2-3 times the performance of the older userland implementation in opensolaris. The numbers stack up as follows:

Parameters:  4 workers x 8 outstanding IOs

COMSTAR iSCSI target

50000 IOPS, 512B, 97% CPU, 24MB/sec  <- Reads
40000 IOPS, 512B, 92% CPU, 17MB/sec  <-Writes

OLD UserLand iSCSI target

17000 IOPS, 512B, 98% CPU, 8MB/sec  <- Reads
15000 IOPS, 512B, 98% CPU, 7.5MB/sec  <-Writes

The tests were conducted with IOMeter, using a 100M zvol with zil disabled. Also these were done over a 1G network between the target and the initiator.

More information on COMSTAR can be found on it’s project page, and the changes can be found in the nexenta-on package in NCP2.

“NCP2 will be released in 1 month so file your bugs, make your additions and voice your opinion now or forever hold your peace!”

The blueprint you need to keep track of NCP2 release is up at launchpad titled “hardy release”.

So there. You have been informed.. if there was a particular bug, or change for NCP you had in mind, let us know! We’re so interested, we’ve created the following ways for you to let us know:

IRC : #nexenta on freenode

Mailing list : gnusol-devel

Launchpad bugs : File a bug..

There are a bunch of things to be done, so your help with development and polishing of NCP2 is welcome and appriciated.

Debtorrent on Nexenta

Find your packages downloading slow on Nexenta? Debtorrent is a technology that brings bittorrent to apt packaging system. We’ve added support for debtorrent on nexenta.org, so you can now seed packages you download for others.. this makes download faster for users living near you.

Setting up

To setup debtorrent, simply run

apt-get install debtorrent

Now tha you have debtorrent running (by default on port 9988, add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.lst

deb debtorrent://localhost:9988/apt.nexenta.org hardy-unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src debtorrent://localhost:9988/apt.nexenta.org hardy-unstable main contrib non-free

Debtorrent is intelligent enough to fallback to normal http mode if debtorrent doesnt work (or there is no one seeding the required package)

Advanced configuration

Debtorrent works great in a LAN environment. So one PC would use the above configuration, and the rest would connect to this single one.

Instructions

Full instructions for setting up can be found on our debtorrent page.

To learn more about debtorrent, visit its homepage.

XFCE on NCP2, Click to see full size

To get this desktop running on your Nexenta install, run

apt-get install xorg
#configure X (or copy a working xorg.conf file over)
Xorg -configure
apt-get install xfce4

Once done, you can start the desktop runnign startx. To install a login manager, run

apt-get install gdm

Come over to #nexenta, and give your thanks to Jason (wavejumper) who has been working on XFCE packages.

We’ve made incredible progress over the past two months, and the community activities have increased. The IRC channel audience has grown considerably. Starting today, we’ll be working on some of the final tasks, before we release NCP2, the final version.

Bounty

This hackathon also features a bounty for various tasks, sponsored by Nexenta Systems. There are small awards for some of the high priority tasks, including porting efforts, documentation, and creating Nexenta spinoffs.

The task list from the announcement.

Package porting:  Most of the packages in the repository are now automatically built. There are a few crucial packages that need to be built manually, and allow the builder to pick up on the rest.

Documentaiton: Not everyone knows how easy some tasks are on Nexenta. Help us write documentation, so new users find migrating much easier.

Distributions: NCP has now evolved to a tested core platform. Use the existing packages and window managers in the repository to build your own distribution using our distribution builder; tune Nexenta for a particular appliance and help us enhance our installer.

Significant contributions will be featured on the Nexenta project Homepage.

Further Information: http://www.nexenta.org/os/Hackathon
IRC web interface: http://www.nexenta.org/chat
Autobuilder: http://builder.tajinc.org/?f=repository_status

Gnome, GIMP and Irssi running on NCP2 (not to mention the Heron)

Huge thanks to dtbartle, who has actively been porting Gnome into the package repository. Why not hop into #nexenta and say thanks.

Theres also other window managers being populated at the moment. Small ones like Enlightenment (e16) and 9wm are fully in.

PS: Also another round of hackthon is in the plans. Stay tuned for more.

Click here to poll

Your feedback will help us in our decision.