Stupid SmartOS Tricks (Page 2)

Stupid SmartOS Tricks

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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 [https://he.net] (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

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 [https://blog.brianewell.com/2013/06/18/hp-n54l-microserver/] in concert with other VMs. Note: This guide has been heavily influenced by the SmartOS wiki article on

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 [https://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-hardware/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

iSCSI Target on SmartOS

iSCSI Target on SmartOS

As a home user of SmartOS [http://www.smartos.org], 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

Transferring Zone Delegated Datasets

Transferring Zone Delegated Datasets

You're minding your own business, re-deploying a zone based on the most up-to-date base image, and suddenly find yourself needing to transfer the contents of a delegated ZFS dataset from old to new. We've all been there. Sure you could manually re-create the dataset(s) in the new zone and

Branded (LX) Zones on SmartOS

Branded (LX) Zones on SmartOS

One of the biggest historical weaknesses of SmartOS has been its inability to provide the Linux API/ABI directly to user space within a zone. This is because the list of system calls are not only different between operating systems, but the way they are handled differs. This means that

Ghost 0.x on SmartOS

Ghost 0.x on SmartOS

This article has been superceeded by a newer version [https://blog.brianewell.com/ghost-v4-on-smartos].Running and maintaining a blog on SmartOS is simple and easy. Today we're going to go over setting up Ghost on SmartOS, configuring an Nginx front-end, as well as configuring SMF to boot it up on

Installing SmartOS

Installing SmartOS

SmartOS was designed by Joyent [https://www.joyent.com/] to be installed on thousands of machines simultaneously at datacenter scales. It can also be used in much smaller deployments of a handful, or even just a single machine. This is excellent in the home virtualization space, as SmartOS integrates the

On to SmartOS

As I continued to research the potential of FreeNAS Plugins (FreeBSD Jails), something was becoming increasingly obvious: I really should be using something else. BSD Jails were great if I wanted to run in a FreeBSD environment, but what about Linux? Or even Windows? While FreeNAS was great in that

Trying out FreeNAS

Trying out FreeNAS

After having a very interesting discussion over new years in person with someone [http://darkain.com/] I thought lived on the opposite side of the country (long story), we got onto the topic of reliable, high-performance data storage for personal use. Both of us, being photographers, have massive stores of

The HP N54L Microserver

The HP N54L Microserver

I can be a hardware snob at times. When I need a new system, I usually spec out what I need, buy the parts and build it myself for a few major reasons: * I want to ensure that the system I'm using matches my workload and that I'm not paying