>Hello,

Hi how are ya?

>I am very new to Solaris, I was using OpenSolaris 2008 LiveCD in Virtual Box 
>and after spending >some time reading about it, I quite like ZFS and Zones. I 
>have played around with ZFS in Virtual >Box creating multiple drives and 
>simulated failures. I have decided to build a new OpenSolaris >box as a File 
>Server as well as many other things. Coming from Gentoo Linux on my other 
>server >very minimal and compiles each binary for my processor based on my 
>compiler flags). I have >found that this is not really how OpenSolaris does 
>things. I also downloded a OpenSolaris SXCE >DVD and tried to use that on a 
>old system I have. First the minimal install was quite larger than >my minimal 
>on Gentoo, and then I didn't have make or any compiler to install the drivers 
>I needed >for my nic. So I definitely do not want that minimal, but the full 
>install (5GB+) seemed a little to >big. Could someone please make sure I 
>understand how Solaris works correctly (ZFS, Zones, etc).

Your best bet is probably to start perusing the forums, reading over the topics 
that have already been posted, and getting as much information as  you can from 
the online documentation.  I can tell you from experience, we can all tell you 
how to do something, but it wont really start sinking in until you have been 
using a given feature for a while.  

>Here is what I would like to do for storage;
>- 2-3x 1TB Drives mirror/raidz on ZFS, to hold home directories 
>(/export/home?). Have not decided >if I want to use 2 mirrored drives or 3 
>with raidz yet.
>- 1 other drive to hold my root zfs pool, as I understand a root pool has 
>restrictions and I want this >separate from my data drives.

If you have that much data your going to be putting on individual drives, then 
you should also consider using a mirror with a hot spare, or a 3 way mirror, 
with the possibility of adding a hot spare later.  If you feel you need more 
protection than is offered in a 3 way mirror, then you definitely need to start 
looking into a RAIDZ or Z2.  

One of the big considerations of using RAIDZ/Z2 is what type of processor you 
have.  (You should really use a 64-bit processor, RAIDZ or otherwise.)  Parity 
calculations can eat up a lot of CPU cycles, but if you have a recent multi 
core processor, in the scale you describe you may not even notice a difference. 
 

>I am planning to put two nic's on my box, one will be from my modem, supplying 
>it with a internet >connection. And the other will be to a gigabit switch for 
>when I expand my network. For this I >would need to install a DHCP server, and 
>a DNS server. In linux I would use dnsmasq to handle >these. Gentoo has a nice 
>guide on this: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/home-router-howto.xml Is >there 
>anything like this for Solaris? If there isn't, im sure I could work it out.

There is plenty of documentation available for Solaris.  It's all pretty well 
written, and some of it is written so thoroughly as to be irritating.  At least 
until that little detail you thought unimportant is the step that saves your 
installation ;)

>I also want to share my home directory to my laptop (Mac OS X) and use rsync 
>to backup some >files onto my server. I could either use CIFS, SMB or NFS. I 
>read that SMB was built into ZFS.

Sharing directories is about as simple as it's going to get I think.  Although 
using rsync, doesn't require sharing filesystems, it can be done pretty simply. 
 If you know how to use rsync in Linux then you know all you need to know 
really.  

>I would like to create a Zone and a SSH Server on this zone so that a few of 
>my friends can access >it. I would also like to use ldap for the 
>authentication as I also want to tie in the login to a website >I will be 
>running. It would be nice to use the ldap server for my account also on the 
>other zone, >possibly use separate "companies" within ldap. (I am new to LDAP).

I think ssh gets installed by default but don't quote me on that one.  Using 
LDAP for authentication shouldn't be any different than if you were using it on 
a regular standalone machine. 

>I would also want some kind of VPN, either IPSec or pptp. This would mainly be 
>for me and could >use ldap. There are not many people in this Zone who I would 
>like to access my VPN, but I would >like one or two to have access to it, 
>could I use ldap and permissions for certain people? I read >that OpenSolaris 
>has IPSec Tunnel's integrated into the operating system. So I would not need 
>to >install additional software.

You should be able to setup permissions with LDAP, but you should also consider 
using the file system permissions and ACL's to help keep people out of where 
you don't want them.  

>From what I understand, this zone does not affect the performance. And I can 
>limit it so that the >SSH users do not use too much of my processor. 

Using resource management, you can lock down your zone to have as little or as 
much access to the main system resources as you like.  

>And also, my SSH users are locked down away >from my main solaris with my file 
>server? The only way they could access it is from the network >(if it didn't 
>have a firewall).

Each zone is pretty much it's own self contained environment.  Other people 
wont have access to your other zones, any more than they would have access to 
another machine.

>I was not sure how the ZFS file system works on multiple Zones, can I mount a 
>ZFS "partition" to a >home directory inside the zone? Or is there be a virtual 
>ZFS inside the zone?

You create a zone path to be used for the zone.  Once that path is set, only 
root can access the path outside of the zone, and users in the zone cannot 
access anything outside of the zone filesystem.

>Could I set up networking in a Zone so that it uses DHCP from my main 
>OpenSolaris? And would >work exactly like connections via the switch.

For this you really need to look into Crossbow.  There isn't any simple answer 
to the above question.
It can be done, but you have to read the docs to get a feel for how.

>I was also wondering what build of OpenSolaris I should use. I don't want to 
>be installing >everything like the LiveCD wanted me to do (GUI, etc).

At this point, the only option if you want to use OpenSolaris as provided by 
Sun, is to install from the live CD, and then uninstall all of the GUI 
components.  Which is a task in and of itself actually.  There are a lot of 
threads on how to do just that.  You'll have to search for them and see what 
you come up with.

>I hope I can get OpenSolaris to work the way I wish :). And I will certainly 
>document my process in >doing so. Thanks in advanced for any help.

If you can do it in Linux, you can probably do it in OpenSolaris.  The caveat 
being it may not come as easy as it did with Linux, since OpenSolaris, is a 
true UNIX, and a lot of things are done quite differently.  

Hope this helps
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]

Reply via email to