ZFS - Stupid SmartOS Tricks

Package Caching on SmartOS

If you use package management software commonly across two or more systems, network package caching may be of benefit to you. In this article, we will setup a package caching solution to service multiple package management systems simultaneously. MethodologyWhile caching packages locally in the file system is already common practice

Hardware

Homelab Updates Part 2

This is a continuation of the previous article on hardware updates to my homelab, focusing on the configuration of the major hardware components discussed. No need for much of a preamble here, lets get into it. Network ConfigurationThere are a bunch of advanced features to experiment with on this Cisco

SmartOS

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

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

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

SmartOS

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

SmartOS

Installing SmartOS

SmartOS was designed by Joyent 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 hypervisor and storage subsystem

SmartOS

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

FreeNAS

Trying out FreeNAS

After having a very interesting discussion over new years in person with someone 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 unique data which