OpenSolaris and data integrety.

Due to a friend of mine’s advice, I recently took the plunge back into Linux. My previous experience with UNIX-based platforms (besides using a MacBook as my daily driver, who counts that right?), have been very bad. I have never been able to manage well on any UNIX-like platform before. This was until last semester during my computer science class. I had to learn C++ in a linux lab and I managed to do ok after learning how to function in a terminal. We used some version of CentOS.

I got into a discussion about Matt’s (SliceofUNIX) new project to build a fileserver. He had been telling me about some good luck he had with this new file system called “ZFS.” While I dont really understand the specifics of it, because file systems are not really my area of expertise outside of knowing the difference between FAT32 and NTFS in a Windows environment, he did explain to me that it operates like a RAID, and a better one at that, constantly error checking and making it easy to setup and expand. So my quest into OpenSolaris began.

Those of you looking for advice on OpenSolaris should continue to Matt’s page ^^^ up there. He has quite a few tutorials on how to do things he has had trouble getting through on the platform.

Because of his advice, it got me thinking of data integrity. Basically, I have single copies of much of my data on external hard drives. Much of it is kept off of my machine simply because having hundreds of GB of music and movies is a waste of precious internal space on my laptop. I decided I want an over-the-network solution to my data integrety needs. However, I haven’t really gotten far enoguh into the idea to do anything about it. I currently have OpenSolaris setup as a fileserver with a ZFS containing a 160GB and 80GB drive I happened to have hanging around. It only makes a zpool, which combines their capacity into one large drive, unline the ZFS I want to do with four 1TB drives giving me 2TB of space, having the ability to lose 2 drives, and none of my data.

I will keep you posted on progress as the semester continues.

Tweet This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Stumble This Post