Anyhow, on to the project. Lately I’ve been working on an old Blade 150 that I have at home trying to get it to recognize the IDE controller card and old hard drives attached. Below you can see a picture of what I’m working with:

I have an UltraSPARC II processor in there running at 650Mhz as well as a gig of RAM (hopefully enough for my purposes). I found an extremely old IDE RAID controller card, switched it to JBOD mode and stuck it connected to 2 spare hard drives. At this time the hard drives are each only 40GB and I haven’t figured out a way for them to stay in the case (not enough space in there). I ran the IDE cables through the PCI slot opening and set the drives on top.

One of the problems I ran into was powering the hard drives, in this case the 150 didn’t have enough spare power hookups for 2 additional drives (in addition to the one inside the machine for the OS), so I ended up gutting another machine of mine for the power supply to power only the hard drives. Slightly out of the picture on the left the power supply is sitting with a paper-clip jammed into the motherboard connector to manually switch it to “always on”. Not a very elegant solution, but for the time being it works. Hopefully I’ll be getting a case for the hard drives and additional power supply so it doesn’t look nearly as ugly.

Anyhow, after installing OpenSolaris build 65, the machine booted up and was able to see the additional 2 hard drives, but panicked and rebooted when I actually selected them, upon rebooting they acted alright. I proceeded to create a mirrored zpool in case of drive failure. At this point it’s only 40GB, but I plan on getting some 300-500 GB drives for the data. Eventually I want this to be shared across the network for Delilah and I to store our important documents on (and it will be backed up also). Definitely a very cheap solution for our simple home.

Does anyone out there have a home server running Solaris? What do you use it for? How does it work out?

Thanks to my beautiful wife Delilah for taking the picture while I was at work!

“I have a small update. I’ve made the number of backups of each
filesystem easier to handle by replacing the hardcoded number with a
variable. I also added some comments so everybody should be able adjust
both the path of the snapshot directory and the number of backups easily.

I decided to show you the disaster scenario for which this script is
being used.

Let’s take a simple server with the following ZFS file systems:

—
root@static:/> zfs list
NAME                   USED   AVAIL   REFER  MOUNTPOINT
tank                   8,78G  101G   28,5K   /export
tank/backup            4,93G  101G   27,5K   /export/backup
tank/backup/snapshots  4,93G  101G   4,93G   /export/backup/snapshots
tank/backup/sysdata    68K    101G   41,5K   /export/backup/sysdata
tank/repository        205M   101G   205M    repository/packages
tank/zones             3,65G  101G   25,5K   /export/zones
tank/zones/ffxi-sites  3,65G  101G   3,63G   /export/zones/ffxi-sites
root@static:/>
—

tank/backup: usual file system, but with compression=on. Very useful for
snapshots, compression rate is 1.66:1
tank/backup/snapshots: The snapshot directory I use in the scripts
tank/backup/sysdata: That’s a backup directory in which essential system
data is stored. Most important: the complete contents of /etc/zones and
perhaps some stuff like /etc/netmasks, /etc/nsswitch.conf, whatever
could be of importance during reconstruction of the host.
tank/repository/packages: That’s where I keep my packages, scripts,
whatever. Just a repository which is shared (sharenfs=ro,anon=o) and
re-mounted in the local zone as `/var/spool/pkg` … makes things easier.
tank/zones/ffxi-sites: That’s the zonepath of the zone `ffxi-sites-zone`.

I bet it’s getting interesting now, because I’ll explain you how to
backup this zone using the script … and how to reconstruct it from
scratch, on another hardware with different network drivers and such.

Okay. I make backups of tank/backup/sysdata (we need the contents of
/etc/zones for reconstruction), tank/repository/packages and, of
course, the entire local zone itself by backing up
tank/zones/ffxi-sites. Use my script for it, e.g. by executing it for
each file system in your crontab and sending it to a backup server.

This will result in two copies. the local copy in
/export/backup/snapshots (you can edit this path in the script) and one
on a remote server. We us the local copy in case someone shot the
database in the local zone or whatever. And the remote copy is needed in
case of a necessary re-installation of the entire server.

Btw: My private ISP only offers plain FTP for accessing backup servers.
FTP isn’t supported by the backup script. I make the local backups
between 1 an 3 am, and I use the following (imperfect) script at 5am to
transfer all backups to the FTP server:

—
#!/bin/bash
HOST='<ip of ftp server>'
USER='<user>'
PASSWD='<pass>'

BACKUPDIR="/export/backup/snapshots"

if [ ! -d $BACKUPDIR ]; then
echo "Backup Directory doesn't exist"
exit 1
fi

cd $BACKUPDIR

# cleanup ftp server, kamikaze style

ftp -n $HOST << END_CLEANUP > /dev/null
quote USER $USER
quote PASS $PASSWD
mdel *.zfs
bye
END_CLEANUP

# transfer all ZFS images to the ftp server

#for FILE in `ls -rt1 *.zfs`; do
# ftp -n $HOST << END_SCRIPT
# quote USER $USER
# quote PASS $PASSWD
# binary
# put $FILE
# bye
# END_SCRIPT
#done

#for FILE in `ls -rt1 *.zfs`; do
ftp -n $HOST << END_SCRIPT >/dev/null
quote USER $USER
quote PASS $PASSWD
binary
mput *.zfs
# put $FILE
quit
END_SCRIPT
#done

exit 0
—

This script isn’t recommended for production use, there’s a plain text
password in it. I only use it because the ftp server is firewalled and
cannot be accessed from other servers using this login – and if someone
hacked into my machine, he won’t need the backups anyway.

Okay, now disaster happens. We have to reconstruct *everything*. So
insert the Solaris DVD into the drive, install Solaris as usual, apply
the Recommend Patches cluster, and so on. Finally, we’re ready create
the ZFS pool again, we create tank/backup/snapshots and copy the ZFS
images from our remote server backup into this directory. We have our
local copies back.

Now: deploy the three filesystems using `zfs receive`, e.g. `zfs receive
tank/backup/sysdata < tank_backup_sysdata-070611-033000.zfs`

We have our zone configuration back now. We `cd` to
/export/backup/sysdata. Then we’re going to copy the `index` file plus
the ?.xml` files back to /etc/zones, replacing the default ones.

We still have to fix the network interface, which changed due to the
(imaginary) new hardware we have to use now. Enter the zone
configuration using `zonecfg`, e.g.:

—-
root@static:/> zonecfg -z ffxi-sites-zone
zonecfg:ffxi-sites-zone> info
zonename: ffxi-sites-zone
zonepath: /export/zones/ffxi-sites
autoboot: false
pool: pool_default
limitpriv:
net:
address: <your zone ip>
physical: rtls0
rctl:
name: zone.cpu-shares
value: (priv=privileged,limit=10,action=none)
attr:
name: comment
type: string
value: ffxi-sites
zonecfg:ffxi-sites-zone>
—

We have to change the “physical” entry to something else, let’s say
we’re using a X4100 now and so we need `e1000g0` instead of `rtls0`.
`ifconfig -a` shows us the device name.

Type `select net address=<your zone ip>`. Then `set pyhsical=e1000g0`.
Then `end`.

We still have to commit the changes. We do this by typing `commit` and
then we `exit`.

All we have to do now is `zoneadm boot ffxi-sites-zone` and we’re online
again, without having to deploy the zone, too.

Okay, done. We’re online again.

Only continue reading if you want to join some unsupported “hacking
procedures”.

Q: What to do in case our zonepath changed, or we want it to be changed?
A: That’s easy. Grab your `vi` and edit /etc/zones/index. Ignore the “DO
NOT EDIT” warning, that’s for girls only. See below on what to do.

Q: I only want to clone a zone, what to do now?
A: `zfs send <source filesystem> | zfs receive <destination
filesystem>`. Or clone and promote a filesystem, your choice. Then grab
you `vi` and edit /etc/zones/index again. Change the IP like we I shows
you earlier before you boot the cloned zone. And don’t forget chmod 700
your new zonepath.

(Matthew Says: Another way to clone as zone, depending on your patch level, can be seen further down here: http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/08/day-in-life-of-solaris-11-admin.html)

Let’s have a look at the index file:

—
root@static:/> cat /etc/zones/index
# Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
# Use is subject to license terms.
#
# ident "@(#)zones-index 1.2 04/04/01 SMI"
#
# DO NOT EDIT: this file is automatically generated by zoneadm(1M)
# and zonecfg(1M). Any manual changes will be lost.
#
global:installed:/
ffxi-sites-zone:installed:/export/zones/ffxi-sites:6cffc060-de2f-c972-f548-f36320bcfccf
root@static:/>
—

“ffxi-sites-zone” is the name of my zone. enter the name of your clone here.
“installed” is the zone’s status. Our filesystems contains a bootable
zone, so “installed” is okay. If you configured a new zone manually and
didn’t install it using `zoneadm` yet, it’ll be “configured” … then
deploy a new, bootable zonepath and set the mode to “installed”. I use
this because I use completely installed zone templates for deploying new
zones, that’s much faster than the official (and supported) `zoneadm -z
<zone> install` way.
/export/zones/ffxi-sites is the zonepath. you may change it. Just make
sure the new zonepath exists and it has mode 700. The latter is very
important.

Make sure you made a backup of your orginal before editing it manually.
You edit it on your own risk.

The entry for a cloned zone may look like this:

—
ffxi-sites2-zone:installed:/export/zones/ffxi-sites2:6cffc060-de2f-c972-f548-f36320bcfccf
—

Okay, and now forget what I told you, because Sun won’t give you the
least bit of support if something goes wrong The fact that I use
such methods for production use won’t help you much if you have a typo
where you shouldn’t have made one.

Hope you had some fun.”

Thanks for the submission Ralf!

From the vmcore file:
ZFS: I/O failure (write on <unknown> off 0: zio 6000620cd40 [L0 ZIL intent log] 1000L/1000P DVA[0]=<0:1300cb9000:1000> zilog uncompressed BE contiguous birth=208621 fill=0 cksum=8eafa7df8b7cb3e:f2fd0

From the /var/adm/messages file:
Jun 5 12:01:11 lava2051 fctl: [ID 517869 kern.warning] WARNING: fp(0)::GPN_ID for D_ID=650700 failed
Jun 5 12:01:11 lava2051 fctl: [ID 517869 kern.warning] WARNING: fp(0)::N_x Port with D_ID=650700, PWWN=5006016841e019a7 disappeared from fabric
Jun 5 12:01:30 lava2051 scsi: [ID 243001 kern.info] /pci@1c,600000/fibre-channel@1/fp@0,0 (fcp0):
Jun 5 12:01:30 lava2051 offlining lun=0 (trace=0), target=650700 (trace=2800004)
Jun 5 12:06:28 lava2051 unix: [ID 836849 kern.notice]
Jun 5 12:06:28 lava2051 ^Mpanic[cpu2]/thread=2a101061cc0:
Jun 5 12:06:28 lava2051 unix: [ID 809409 kern.notice] ZFS: I/O failure (write on <unknown> off 0: zio 6000620cd40 [L0 ZIL intent log] 1000L/1000P DVA[0]=<0:1300cb9000:1000> zilog uncompressed BE contiguous birth=208621 fill=0 cksum=8eafa7df8b7cb3e:f2fd0a04af0e949e:1a:f3): error 5)
... some stuff ...
Jun 5 12:09:55 lava2051 savecore: [ID 570001 auth.error] reboot after panic: ZFS: I/O failure (write on <unknown> of
f 0: zio 6000620cd40 [L0 ZIL intent log] 1000L/1000P DVA[0]=<0:1300cb9000:1000> zilog uncompressed BE contiguous birth=208621 fill=0 cksum=8eafa7df8b7cb3e:f2fd0
Jun 5 12:09:55 lava2051 savecore: [ID 748169 auth.error] saving system crash dump in /var/crash/lava2051/*.1

Repeat x 3 so far. Like I said, extremely annoying.

Here’s what I think the problem is so far: I have a 500g ZFS pool built on a single Clariion LUN that is exported to this machine. From the looks of it the machine is having trouble seeing the LUN all the time, when it disappears ZFS freaks out and panics because of a I/O failure. Now that I know what the problem is, I have no idea how to make the LUN stop disappearing. Guess I’m off to check some Clariion logs and see where that gets me. Anyone out there have any other suggestions on how I could go about fixing this problem? I have little experience in working with core dumps. I would be extremely grateful

P.S. Yes, I know I should have mirrored the ZFS pool on 2 or more devices in case of a problem like this. This is more my “proof-of-concept” machine where I try out new things and see how developers/QA react to them.

UPDATE:
It looks like the problem was a problem on the Clariion side, for the meantime, we exported a LUN from a different clariion, did a zfs attach, waited for the data to be mirrored and then detached the old one. Fixed! <3 ZFS

UPDATE 2:
Now the data is mirrored to a different Clariion. fun fun. Interestingly enough, EMC doesn’t officially support ZFS on Clariion, only on Symmetrix.

#!/bin/bash
# backup_zfssnap.sh, (c) 2007 ralf [dot] ramge [at] webde [dot] de

BACKUPDIR="/export/backup/snapshots"
DSTAMP=`date '+%y%m%d-%H%M%S'`
FILESYS=$1
DEST=$2
REPLICA=$3
BACKUPNAME=`echo $FILESYS | sed 's/\//_/g'`
BACKUPFILE=$BACKUPNAME"-"$DSTAMP".zfs"
SNAPSHOT=$FILESYS"@backup-"$DSTAMP

if [ ! -d $BACKUPDIR ]; then
echo "Backup Directory doesn't exist"
exit 1
fi

cd $BACKUPDIR

# Check here if we have 7 backup files, create them if we don't
COUNT_FILES=`ls -1 $BACKUPNAME* | wc -l`
if [ $COUNT_FILES -le 1 ]; then
for COUNT in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
do
if [ ! -f $BACKUPNAME"-000000-00000"$COUNT".zfs" ]; then
touch $BACKUPNAME"-000000-00000"$COUNT".zfs"
sleep 1
fi
done
fi

# Check here that we have less than 8 backup files
COUNT_FILES=`ls -1 $BACKUPNAME* | wc -l`
if [ $COUNT_FILES -gt 7 ]; then
# echo "More than 7 backup files exist"
# exit 1
while [ $COUNT_FILES -gt 7 ]
do
OLDEST_BACKUP_FILE=`ls -rt1 $BACKUPNAME* | head -1`
rm $OLDEST_BACKUP_FILE
let COUNT_FILES=COUNT_FILES-1
done
fi

# Find the oldest backup file to delete
OLDEST_BACKUP_FILE=`ls -rt1 $BACKUPNAME* | head -1`

# Create the snapshot
zfs snapshot $SNAPSHOT

# Create a filesystem image in the local backup directory
zfs send $SNAPSHOT > $BACKUPDIR"/"$BACKUPFILE

# Check for $2 and, if exists, create a second copy on a remote host for tape archival
if [ ! -z $2 ]; then
`zfs send $SNAPSHOT | ssh root@$2 "cat >$BACKUPDIR/$BACKUPFILE"`
fi

# Check for $3 and, if exists, mirror the filesystem on the remote host
if [ ! -z $3 ]; then
`ssh root@$2 "zfs receive $3 < $BACKUPDIR/$BACKUPFILE"`
fi

# Check for $4 and, if exists, clone and promote the filesystem on the remote host
if [ ! -z $4 ]; then
`ssh root@$2 "zfs clone $SNAPSHOT $4; sleep 30; zfs promote $4"`
fi

# Get the trash out of the house
rm $OLDEST_BACKUP_FILE
if [ ! -z $2 ]; then
ssh root@$2 "rm $BACKUPDIR/$OLDEST_BACKUP_FILE"
fi

SNAPLIST=`zfs list -H | grep $FILESYS | grep @backup | cut -f1`
for i in $SNAPLIST; do
zfs destroy $i
done

# Exit cleanly
exit 0

Thanks for the submission Ralf! (I changed your email address in the script comments so you wouldn’t get spam)

Firstly, the script: http://lee.hinmanphoto.com/files/zdiff.txt (formatting long scripts in wordpress’ crazy editor is a very long and arduous process, thus I’m just linking to the script in this case, if anyone knows of a better place to stick it let me know). chmod +x it and away you go!

Edit: Sun was nice enough to host the file for me, here’s a link to their version in case the other one goes down: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/scripts/submittedScripts/zdiff.txt

In a nutshell, here’s what it does:

• Allows you to diff a file inside a ZFS snapshot with the current file in the filesystem and (optionally) print out the line differences
• Recursively diff an entire snapshot using md5 sums and (optionally) printing out the line differences
• Display the md5 sums for each file in a ZFS snapshot and filesystem (this can get old to look at very quickly)

Basically, that doesn’t mean a whole lot, here’s the output from the -h option:

ZFS Snapshot diff
./zdiff.pl [-dhirv] <zfs shapshot name> [filename]

-d Display the lines that are different (diff output)
-h Display this usage
-i Ignore files that don't exist in the snapshot (only necessary for recursing)
-r Recursively diff every file in the snapshot (filename not required)
-v Verbose mode

[filename] is the filename RELATIVE to the ZFS snapshot root. For example, if
I had a filesystem snapshot called pool/data/zone@initial. The filename '/etc/passwd'
would refer to the filename /pool/data/zone/etc/passwd in the filesystem and filename
/pool/data/zone/.zfs/snapshot/initial/etc/passwd in the snapshot.

A couple of examples:
./zdiff.pl -v -r -i pool/zones/lava2019@Fri
Checks the current pool/zones/lava2019 filesystem against the snapshot
returning the md5sum difference of any files (ignore files that don't
exist in the snapshot). With verbose mode

./zdiff.pl -d pool/zones/lava2019@Mon /root/etc/passwd
Check the md5sum for /pool/zones/lava2019/root/etc/passwd and compare
it to /pool/zones/lava2019/.zfs/snapshot/Mon/root/etc/passwd. Display
the lines that are different also.

Here’s what the output is going to look like:

-bash-3.00# ./zdiff.pl -d -v -r -i pool/zones/lava2019@Fri
Recursive diff on pool/zones/lava2019@Fri
Filesystem: /pool/zones/lava2019, Snapshot: Fri
Comparing: /pool/zones/lava2019/
to: /pool/zones/lava2019/.zfs/snapshot/Fri/
** /pool/zones/lava2019/root/etc/shadow is different
** MD5(/pool/zones/lava2019/root/etc/shadow)= 04fa68e7f9dbc0afbf8950bbb84650a6
** MD5(/pool/zones/lava2019/.zfs/snapshot/Fri/root/etc/shadow)= 4fc845ff7729e804806d8129852fa494
17d16
< tom:*LK*:::::::
** /pool/zones/lava2019/root/etc/dfs/dfstab is different
** MD5(/pool/zones/lava2019/root/etc/dfs/dfstab)= 8426d34aa7aae5a512a0c576ca2977b7
** MD5(/pool/zones/lava2019/.zfs/snapshot/Fri/root/etc/dfs/dfstab)= c3803f151cb3018f77f42226f699ee1b
13d12
< share -F nfs -o rw -d "Data" /data

etc, etc, etc.

I am planning on using it so I can audit certain files on different zones (like /etc/passwd) against an initial ZFS snapshot to see what’s changed. Nice little way to keep track of stuff. Email me with any bugs. Matthew dot hinman at gmail dot com.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

my $zfsname = shift || die "Need a filesystem name\n";

my $day = `date`;

$day =~ s/(Sun|Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat)[\S\s]+/$1/gi;

my $snapname = "$zfsname\@$day";
my $exist = system("zfs list $snapname");

# if it already exists, delete it
if($exist == 0) {
print "Destroying previous weeks snapshot...";
system("zfs destroy $snapname");
print "done.\n";
}

print "Creating daily snapshot...";
system("zfs snapshot $snapname\n");
print "done.\n";

And here’s the crontab entry:
0 2 * * * /usr/sbin/zsnap.pl pool/zones/lava2019
(replace “pool/zones/lava2019″ with whichever zfs you want a snapshot of)

Easy as cake, you’ll always have a zfs snapshot called <zfsname>@Sun through <zfsname>@Sat to rollback to!