Google looking at OpenSolaris? (and an article cameo by yours truly)

Dale Ghent | September 21, 2006

An article over at Computer World reveals a rumor that Google might be investigating OpenSolaris as its future primary platform. The article goes on to describe the OpenSolaris community as it stands today, just over a year after its release. I’m quoted at the top of page 3.

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New CDs have arrived

Dale Ghent | September 11, 2006

Ah, more fodder for the collection. Today’s batch from PsyShop includes:

  1. Adham Shaikh - Journey To The Sun (Interchill)
  2. Banco De Gaia - Farewell Ferengistan (Disco Gecko)
  3. David Bickley - Still Rivers At night (Psychonavigation)
  4. Digital Samsara - Blue Beryll (Digital Samsara)
  5. Entheogenic - Golden Cap (Chillcode Records)
  6. Gaudi - Testa 1105 (Emit)
  7. Kuba - Inside Out (Dragonfly)
  8. Space Funghi Project - Elektrik Psylocibe Experience (Sirius Records)
  9. Sundial - Metabasis (Flow)
  10. Ten Madison - Grounded (Millenium)
  11. Zero Cult - Art of Harmony (Cosmicleaf Records)
  12. Compilation - A Magical Journey 2 (Ajana)
  13. Compilation - Escape From Chaos (Tempest)
  14. Compilation - Gathering The Tribe (Interchill)
  15. Compilation - Kumharas Vol. 4 (Hoots Records)
  16. Compilation - Oxycanta (Ultimae)
  17. Compilation - Patchuli Sexy Lounge (Moonstone Records)

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The hard drive: 50 years old

Dale Ghent |

Here’s something that should be dear to any storage manager’s heart: the 50th birthday of the hard drive. CNet has posted a silent video of IBM’s first hard drive which held a total of 5MB of data. IBM announced this new technology on September 13, 1956.

Click here to view it. (Warning: a short ad precedes it)

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SIIG eSATA II PCIe card and OpenSolaris

Dale Ghent | September 10, 2006

I went out today and picked up a 1x PCIe eSATA card made by SIIG (model SC-SAE412-S1) and put it in my OpenSolaris dev box. As expected, the si3124 driver picked up on the Silicon Image 3132 chip on this card and was fine with it. Now I just need to get a multi-bay external SATA disk box to hook up to this card so I may continue with my NAS appliance project.

It seems that the non-RAID SATA/eSATA cards made by SIIG are all based on either the SI 3124 (for PCI/PCIX) and 3132 (for PCIe) chips, so they’re a safe bet if you’re looking for such a thing for your Solaris 10/OpenSolaris box, as the si3124 driver (part of the SATA framework) should jive with it.

cfgadm -al output with a Maxtor STM3500630AS disk attached to each of the two eSATA ports on this card:

Ap_Id                          Type         Receptacle   Occupant     Condition
sata0/0::dsk/c7t0d0            disk         connected    configured   ok
sata0/1::dsk/c7t1d0            disk         connected    configured   ok

/usr/X11/bin/scanpci output:

pci bus 0x0002 cardnum 0x00 function 0x00: vendor 0x1095 device 0x3132
Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller

Those two disks are now a mirrored set in a ZFS pool:

[daleg@helium]~$ pfexec zpool status local
  pool: local
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        local       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror    ONLINE       0     0     0
            c7t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c7t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

It works!

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