Stupid SmartOS Tricks

A silly little blog about grand technological triumphs using little more than stupid SmartOS tricks.

SmartOS Manifests

SmartOS Manifests

SmartOS manifests, also sometimes referred to as zone manifests, are JSON files that describe the resources and permissions to be allocated and granted to a given guest zone on SmartOS. They are used by SmartOS global zones to instance discrete guest zones, either through Triton or directly on the global

Plex on SmartOS

Plex on SmartOS

Plex is a client-server media player suite combined with a hybrid video streaming service, and is currently the most popular do-it-yourself method of media streaming. While the Plex Media Player is open source, the Plex Media Server is closed source, and only distributed by Plex to a discrete set of

Samba on SmartOS

Samba on SmartOS

While TrueNAS is a powerful tool for setting up simple and easy network addressable storage, there's a lot of unnecessary feature overlap between TrueNAS and SmartOS. Both operating systems prefer direct hardware access, and passing through ZFS volumes to HVM for TrueNAS to format as ZFS would just be sacrilege

Ansible on SmartOS

Ansible on SmartOS

It's easy to have a love-hate relationship with Infrastructure Automation. On one hand, the principle of Infrastructure Automation is fantastic: Using portable and well defined modules of code to ensure consistent deployments of software and configurations to potentially hundreds or thousands of physical or virtual machines is how we should

SmartOS in 2021

SmartOS in 2021

What started years ago as a wild goose chase for a scalable first-class hyper-converged infrastructure ultimately led to the fantastic discovery of Joyent SmartOS. While I've barely looked back since, the world has changed significantly since then, especially with the exodus of multiple high profile Joyent engineers from that company.

su vs sudo on SmartOS

su vs sudo on SmartOS

For as long as there have been multi-user operating systems, there has been the need to switch between those users. Clearly, this can be done by directly starting a session as a given user, or even logging in again through localhost, but this approach tends to break down when manipulating

The Base SmartOS Zone

The Base SmartOS Zone

SmartOS Zones make for excellent blank slates to do development or production work from. Except as it turns out, they're not blank slates. The two most minimal Zone images, base and minimal start out with over a dozen running processes on them. What are those processes and what functionality do

Minecraft on SmartOS

Minecraft on SmartOS

Minecraft. It's one of those games that can appeal to many different people in many different ways. I got into playing under the assumption that modded Minecraft was the norm, and that calculating the optimum designs for automated power production and gargantuan resource-gathering apparatuses was the entire point of the

Configuring Readline on SmartOS

Configuring Readline on SmartOS

One of the more annoying differences I noticed in the switch from Linux to SmartOS was while connecting to a terminal via PuTTY: The former supports using the Home and End keys to navigate to the beginning and end of a command-line buffer while the latter does not, instead spitting

DLNA on SmartOS

DLNA on SmartOS

Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) was a fantastic answer to the age-old question of, "How the heck are we going to get all of these media libraries and media players to talk to each other?!" I say "was" because Plex is pretty much the only serious media server at the

Neo4j on SmartOS

Neo4j on SmartOS

If you've never played around with Neo4j before, stop reading this page and download it now, or at least go try out the Neo4j Sandbox. Yes, I mean right now. I'll wait. Neo4j is pretty awesome huh? What's that? You want to spin up your own SmartOS zone and install

Lets Encrypt on SmartOS

Lets Encrypt on SmartOS

If you think encryption is awesome, then the Let's Encrypt project is pretty much free awesomeness. Operating as a crowd-funded 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Let's Encrypt provides a free, automated and open Certificate Authority to the Internet at large. Which certainly beats paying for some third-party to sign your

SNAP on SmartOS

SNAP on SmartOS

Despite being used in the open-source web-development world for over a decade, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) stacks remain a staple of the web-development environment, and show very little signs of fading in general use. These stacks have driven the development of countless startups and large scale production projects

Receiving Email on SmartOS

Receiving Email on SmartOS

If sending email seems difficult, receiving email must seem nightmarishly complex. One of the biggest issues for senders: differentiating your legitimate email from the sheer volume of unsolicited messages, is nothing compared to being on the business end of that deluge. In addition to providing the counterparts of nearly everything

Sending Email from SmartOS

Sending Email from SmartOS

Sending email is complicated today. Unsolicited spam is easily as rampant as it has ever been, which has led to legal precedents, clever countermeasures, and ultimately high technical requirements just to reliably have your email end up in the right inbox. Setting up a simple email server just isn't that

Tunnels on SmartOS

Tunnels on SmartOS

We've all been there: You're managing two private network segments that need to have quick, secure communication between them but are separated by a few hundredths of a second of the wild and open Internet. What to do... This is a brief guide on setting up a secure IPsec encrypted

Certificate Authority on SmartOS

Certificate Authority on SmartOS

Running your own Certificate Authority is truly the best option if you're managing a large number of systems which need to have secured, authenticated communication flowing between them. While it can be a fair amount of work to setup and maintain, it is much cheaper than signing each of your

Certificates on SmartOS

Certificates on SmartOS

Encryption. Pretty much the coolest thing since sliced bread. Where would we be without it? Probably not using iPhones, instead, calling our banks and talking to real people to get business done. In short, we'd be in the dark ages. This guide will go over how to setup X.509

Asymmetric Cryptosystems

Asymmetric Cryptosystems

This week, we will be diving a bit deeper into how asymmetric cryptosystems work to answer common questions about key size and key type. This article is part of an ongoing series on using X.509 encryption on SmartOS. It's recommended to read the previous article before continuing. OverviewAsymmetric cryptosystems

Understanding X.509

Understanding X.509

This week, we will be exploring the general architecture of X.509 to get a better idea of how it provides security for its users. This post is intended for people who are unfamiliar with the general architecture of X.509. I will be addressing the wide use of OpenSSL

Hurricane Electric on SmartOS

Hurricane Electric on SmartOS

Hurricane Electric (HE) is a global Internet Service Provider that offers free IPv6 connectivity from most of its points of presence through IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels. This is a short guide on setting up simple IPv6 connectivity for a SmartOS Zone (or specifically, for a Zone configured as a router) through HE's

Home Router on SmartOS

Home Router on SmartOS

A SmartOS zone can serve quite nicely as a NATing router for a home network. It works incredibly well on the HP N54L Microserver in concert with other VMs. Note: This guide has been heavily influenced by the SmartOS wiki article on NAT using Etherstubs. In addition to the SmartOS

Stupid chmod tricks

Stupid chmod tricks

Coming from a long history of being a Linux user, I've had plenty of familiarity with using chmod, chattr and setfacl to modify how the system behaved around particular files. After a few years of using SmartOS, I'm rather happy to have found out that Sun appears to have folded

Yubikey on SmartOS

Yubikey on SmartOS

I've been using a Yubikey Neo for the last few months and I LOVE it. The Two-Factor Authentication of U2F for websites should always have been this easy, and it's extremely convenient that this also serves as multiple hardware OATH-TOTP tokens for sites that don't yet support U2F. It's NFC

iSCSI Target on SmartOS

iSCSI Target on SmartOS

As a home user of SmartOS, I often time find myself using the operating system in ways not officially documented or endorsed by Joyent. One such use involved a project investigating the feasibility of using ZFS ZVOLs hosted on a SmartOS global zone to back the system volume of my