Australian Internet Censorship
Tuesday 28 October 2008, 09:07 WST —
The Australian government, in an effort to protect “The Children” are trying to put into effect, Internet censorship at the ISP level. This is stupid, ignoring the moral, and social reasons for a second (as these are generally very gray areas), you can look at the technical reasons.
For one, it can slow down your Internet connection as much as 80%, not only that, but, well, it won’t really stop anyone from getting to filtered websites. You could easily get around it by just setting up a VPN, or other proxy service for your connection. As the saying goes, “Locks only keep honest people out”.
OpenSolaris and no menu screen boot issue
Friday 17 October 2008, 13:44 WST —
I like OpenSolaris, ZFS is very cool, and I’ve toyed with zones a little, and I’m yet to really try DTrace. However, when it comes to ZFS, there’s one thing that’s a bit of a worry, the complete and utter loss of your data. Now in theory if you’ve got a redundant pool, then your dataloss should be very minimal, however, certain things can happen that you should be careful playing with things that are cutting edge.
What the hell am I on about?
Well, on my home server, all by itself, it decided that it would no longer boot. GRUB would load, however the menu wouldn’t, no spashimage, no menu selection, just the grub command line. I really couldn’t be bothered to try and fix it to be honest, and it gave me a chance to document how to get MediaTomb, etc, setup for it.
The problem, is pretty much described in this OpenSolaris forum post.
Anyway, today, I had the same problem with our email server at work, I rebooted, and the machine wouldn’t boot. Because it wasn’t easier to start from stratch, I had to try and nut the problem out. Unfortunately I don’t even know what the problem is, I’m just not that good, I had already tried directly entering grub commands to get it to boot (getting the same result as in the forum post).
Luckily, using Google, I found some pointers to get myself sorted. Actually, this post, they even made a wiki entry for it here. First time I tried it, it didn’t solve the problem, however, I thought I would also try it on the older boot enviroment… success!!! Sort of….
Initially, I had only done the update on rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-snv_95-1 (it is updated to snv98 despite the name), however, after also doing the procedure on rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-snv_95, I got my grub menu back!! Woohoo! Oh, wait… er… kernel panic….
So after much wailing, thinking, and googling, I really had nothing else to try, but I had noticed that there was a opensolaris-work-2 boot environment I had forgot. So basically I followed the procedure for all three of my boot environments, I also just left the zpool imported (I was using a snv98 LiveCD) and rebooted the machine.
Success! So now the server is up and running again, but it’s things like this that really scare me about using OpenSolaris and ZFS.
Update:
I’ve recently found out that the RAM in my home server is faulty, no matter how good a filesystem is, it still can’t stop the hardware from screwing it up. However, it has to be said that, despite the flakey hardware I’ve only lost one, or two files.
OpenSolaris, ZFS Backups
Thursday 02 October 2008, 16:21 WST —
At work, we use ZFS for our file storage (it’s setup to scrub nightly, and takes snapshots every 15 minutes, very useful since I can’t get our radio technicians to use source control, it acts as a useful “undo” feature). However, backing the data up can be a bit problematic. At the moment we don’t have a tape drive, or something that I can get to automatically backup the data.
Anyway, to be on the safe side, I’m currently backing up the data, and I thought I’d use an external HD with ZFS. This gives me nice error checking, plus lets me use the following to backup the files:
zfs send storage/archives@hourly-2008-10-02-15-00-00 | ssh aldredmr@10.0.0.76 pfexec zfs recv backup/archives@2008-10-02-15-00-00As usual, check Sun’s documentation for the info.
Quick Links
Categories:
Archives:
- May 2010
- February 2010
- August 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- August 2007
- July 2007
- February 2007
- June 2006
- April 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- October 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- April 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- August 2004
- July 2004
- June 2004
- May 2004
- April 2004
- March 2004
- January 2004
- December 2003
- November 2003
- October 2003
- July 2003
- May 2003
- April 2003
- March 2003
- February 2003
- January 2003
- October 2002
- August 2002
- July 2002
Other:
Meta:
