Here’s how I fixed it:

1. Fire up Preware, and press the drop down option in the top left hand corner of the screen marked Preware.
2. Select Saved Package List. This is a list of all the packages you have installed on your Touchpad.
3. Press the update button to synchronise this list. A notification will appear in the top right to say that the list has been updated successfully.
4. Press the back button to get back to the main screen of Preware. Tap in the search area at the top and search for Emergency.
5. In the returned list of packages, tap “Emergency Patch Recovery” and select Install. This patch will remove all custom Preware patches and updates, then ask you to reboot your Touchpad.
6. When your Touchpad starts up again, all your patches will be goneski. Not to worry, though – you don’t have to reinstall everything manually since you updated your patch list earlier.
7. Fire up Preware and select Saved Package List again.
8. Press Install All. Preware will reinstall all your patches and ask you to restart Luna.

You should now be able to install the new version of Muffle System Logging.

From Apple.com:

Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.

Bam! That’s their selling point! Somebody gets paid lots of money to write that sentence, and they earn it all, because that sentence will sell several billion of these things.

Geeks are getting pissed off because this isn’t a real computer/doesn’t run OS X/doesn’t have XYZ/is a glorified iPod touch. This is because geeks know nothing about advertising, which is another way of saying they don’t know how people work. Admen get paid to understand the entire planet and to synthesize it all into a sentence. So when you look at Apple’s advertising, you know that this isn’t just empty speech. Apple has figured out what the entire world wants and it is magic and revolution. That’s how they’re selling it. They figure the only people who won’t want an iPad are people who don’t like magic.

And guys, they have a point. This thing could save the publishing industry and the newspaper/magazine industry. It could revolutionize the digital fine arts. It does essentially everything that can possibly fit on a screen that size, almost unconsciously. It is so magic that it does things you’d never imagine wanting something to do. (There’s a hands-on video of a guy handing the iPad to his friend, and by the time the friend’s picked up the other end the screen’s flipped over and reoriented itself for him.)

Apple is such a big and powerful company that it can get away with things you don’t even notice because there’s so much going on. They’ve killed every photo frame company on the planet today, you know that? A cottage industry annihilated. They’re going to reintroduce the part of music that went away when the LP died because they’re offering a special music format with artwork and special footage and just unbelievable immersion in an album, and that entire format is so minimal to their plans that they don’t see fit to mention it on the iPad site. I’m betting they’ll kill most of the Kindle, because people like magic more than they like epaper. And when developers hit this thing, you’ll see them kill off proprietary industry after proprietary industry, because now the hardware’s available, most data you’ll ever need is available, and so the only thing you need to make a beautiful program is a beautiful graphic designer.

It’s easy to look at the iPad skeptically and say that, no, it’s not doing anything truly new. It’s basing itself off the iPhone and the Macbook. Sure, the unibody is revolutionary, the battery is revolutionary, the interface is revolutionary, but it’s all been done before. To which I say, Yes, but it’s never been done all at once. It’s like how Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band wasn’t making any sort of music that wasn’t all pioneered. Yeah, but it did it all at once. And after it came out, music exploded because suddenly everything was allowed. This is kind of like that.

Apple’s not stupid, critics of Apple. It’s launched two products in a row that led to Apple’s dominating the music industry and gave it a position of power in the movie, television, phone, and gaming industries. It’s not like they did that accidentally. This is the most powerful company that’s ever existed.

How did they accomplish that? What will lead to them becoming more successful in all those and gaining an even larger monopoly in other fields? It’s really not hard.

Verizon launched a Droid ad two months ago that essentially let the world know how doomed they were. The ad showed a bunch of “iDon’t”s. iDon’t have 5 megapixels. iDon’t have multitasking. Item after item of flaws in the iPhone that this new technology could solve.

Apple, meanwhile, showed a phone that could speak foreign languages at you, identify birdcalls in the wilderness, guide you through cities. They weren’t selling technical features. They were selling you magic. Real magic. The kind of magic where, thanks to world-class designers and programmers and marketers, it actually comes true.

The iPad is a 10” computer with a 16GB flash drive and multitouch technology. What makes that so worthwhile? Haven’t we seen this before? How is this better than a Windows tablet or a netbook?

Here’s why. Apple’s not actually selling a computer. Or a flash drive or multitouch. They needed to make those things for their product, but that’s not what the product is. The product is, simply put, a magical screen that can do anything you ever want it to, no matter what that is.

Here you go. It’s five hundred dollars. If you pay me that, I will give you this magical thing that can do anything. You don’t have to read a manual. It will do anything, and it will do it right now, out of the box.

Other companies are selling computers. Apple’s selling magic. Which one would you rather have?

This article was written by Rory Marinich.

But today I decided that the easy-peasiest way for me to host this site would be to go full circle and move it back to wordpress.com with a custom domain.

For anyone who’s considering moving a self-hosted wordpress blog back to wordpress.com, the process is pretty simple.

Create a new blog on wordpress.com, then use the import/export functionality to dump all the stories out of your old blog and import them into the new one. It’ll even bring across the pictures you uploaded and store them in your new storage space.

Then once you’ve got it looking right, click “Upgrades” and select to map your domain. You’ll need to have access to the DNS settings of your domain so you can point the nameservers to wordpress.com, but it’s a relatively simple process and there’s a stack of howtos available.

Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with my Wiki.

Enjoy!

But all that changed when I found this article.

All you’ll need is something reasonably modern – in my case it was the following hardware:

• Gigabyte X48-DS4 Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo 3.2GHz
• 4Gb of DDR2-800 RAM
• Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1Tb

I also didn’t have a large enough USB memory stick, so instead I used an 80Gb 2.5″ hard disk and an IDE to USB adaptor. If your motherboard is able to boot from a USB key, it should be able to boot from one of these too.

Following the guide is relatively easy, but there is one step which was missed (at least in my case), and that’s the installation of Chameleon on your hard disk once you’ve finished the install. Unless you want to keep your USB key permanently plugged in to your system, I’d suggest you go through the boot installer steps again once you’ve finished and use the ID of your main hard disk.

Enjoy!

To upgrade, open a terminal and run the following commands:

user@opensolaris:~$ pfexec su -
root@opensolaris:~# pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev opensolaris.org
root@opensolaris:~# pkg image-update

• How do I change out disks which have failed?
• How do I change out smaller disks for larger ones?
• Can I add more disks to my pool?

All three questions are quite easily answered, and can, for the most part, be done with a single tool.

First up, what happens when a disk fails. I’ve hot-removed one of the virtual hard disks from my array to simulate a failure and see what Solaris does.

root@opensolaris:/naspool/movies# zpool status naspool
 pool: naspool
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices are faulted in response to persistent errors.
 Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a
 degraded state.
action: Replace the faulted device, or use 'zpool clear' to mark the device
 repaired.
 scrub: none requested
config:

 NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 naspool     DEGRADED     0     0     0
 raidz1    DEGRADED     0     0     0
 c8t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t4d0  FAULTED      3   953     0  too many errors

errors: No known data errors

Oh, dear. It looks like c8t4d0 has faulted and the pool is currently in a degraded state. But is our data still there?

root@opensolaris:/naspool/movies# ls -lah
total 29G
drwxr-xr-x 2 astro root    5 2009-10-10 10:01 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 astro root    5 2009-10-09 16:01 ..
-rw------T 1 root  root  10G 2009-10-10 09:55 10gigfile
-rw------T 1 root  root  10G 2009-10-10 09:58 10gigfile2
-rw------T 1 root  root 9.0G 2009-10-10 10:01 9gigfile

Ok, my data is safe for the time being, but with one disk down I don’t have any room for error. I’ll have to replace that hard disk with a new one. First thing I’ll have to do is shut the system down so that we can add the new disk. While I’m adding a disk in VMWare’s hardware interface, imagine yourself crawling under your desk with a screwdriver and an anti static strap.

Righto, so let’s say I had another 10Gb disk lying around, and I’ve popped it in to my server. Now all I need to do is tell Solaris that it’s there and that it should be used to replace the failed drive in my naspool array. So boot the system back up, log in, grab a command line, become root, and…

root@opensolaris:~# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c8t0d0
/pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@0,0
1. c8t1d0
/pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@1,0
2. c8t2d0
/pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@2,0
3. c8t3d0
/pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@3,0
4. c8t5d0
/pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@5,0
Specify disk (enter its number):

Ok, our new disk is c8t5d0, the next SCSI disk in the chain after the old failed disk. Let’s use zpool to replace c8t4d0 with c8t5d0.

root@opensolaris:~# zpool replace naspool c8t4d0 c8t5d0

Tough, huh? Ok, so how’s naspool looking?

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status naspool
pool: naspool
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
scrub: resilver in progress for 0h0m, 4.26% done, 0h3m to go
config:
NAME           STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
naspool        DEGRADED     0     0     0
raidz1       DEGRADED     0     0     0
c8t1d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t2d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t3d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
replacing  DEGRADED     0     0    45
c8t4d0   FAULTED      0     0     0  too many errors
c8t5d0   ONLINE       0     0     0  25.3M resilvered
errors: No known data errors

So naspool still degraded, but it is ‘resilvering‘ the information on to the new disk – copying all of the data and parity info so that we’ll be back to a fully redundant state. As it’s running, we can monitor it:

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status naspool
pool: naspool
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
scrub: resilver in progress for 0h1m, 79.09% done, 0h0m to go
config:
NAME           STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
naspool        DEGRADED     0     0     0
raidz1       DEGRADED     0     0     0
c8t1d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t2d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t3d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
replacing  DEGRADED     0     0    67
c8t4d0   FAULTED      0     0     0  too many errors
c8t5d0   ONLINE       0     0     0  4.71G resilvered
errors: No known data errors

And when it’s finished, we’ll see that the resilver is complete:

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status naspool
pool: naspool
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed after 0h2m with 0 errors on Sat Oct 10 10:28:01 2009
config:
NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
naspool     ONLINE       0     0     0
raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
c8t5d0  ONLINE       0     0     0  6.73G resilvered
errors: No known data errors

As you can see, resilvering disks is nice and quick. My array is now fully redundant again, and can suffer another disk failure without missing a beat. So that covers how to replace a failed disk, what’s next?

The next step is to replace disks with larger ones to increase capacity on our array.

The method for doing this is pretty much identical to the way we replaced a failed disk – add a new disk, then tell Solaris to replace one with another. For example, I’ll add in a new 50Gb disk:

Then I’ll fire up Solaris, log in and check format to see what its new ID is.

root@opensolaris:~# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
 0. c8t0d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@0,0
 1. c8t1d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@1,0
 2. c8t2d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@2,0
 3. c8t3d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@3,0
 4. c8t5d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@5,0
 5. c9t0d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,1976@3/sd@0,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

So there it is as c9t0d0. Let’s replace the first disk in the array with this new 50Gb monster.

root@opensolaris:~# zpool replace naspool c8t1d0 c9t0d0
root@opensolaris:~# zpool status
 pool: naspool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: resilver completed after 0h2m with 0 errors on Sun Oct 11 08:53:53 2009
config:

 NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 naspool     ONLINE       0     0     0
 raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
 c9t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0  9.69G resilvered
 c8t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t5d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

 pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

 NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

So now that our new disk is up and running, do a quick reboot and check the new size of your zpool.

root@opensolaris:~# zpool list
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
naspool  39.8G  39.1G   636M    98%  ONLINE  -
rpool    7.94G  3.40G  4.53G    42%  ONLINE  -

Awesome. So let’s do the same for the other disks in the array:

root@opensolaris:~# zpool list
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
naspool  39.8G  39.1G   636M    98%  ONLINE  -
rpool    7.94G  3.40G  4.53G    42%  ONLINE  -
root@opensolaris:~# zpool status naspool
 pool: naspool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

 NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 naspool     ONLINE       0     0     0
 raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
 c9t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t5d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
root@opensolaris:~# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
 0. c8t0d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@0,0
 1. c8t1d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@1,0
 2. c8t2d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@2,0
 3. c8t3d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@3,0
 4. c8t5d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@5,0
 5. c9t0d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,1976@3/sd@0,0
 6. c9t1d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,1976@3/sd@1,0
 7. c9t2d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,1976@3/sd@2,0
 8. c9t3d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,1976@3/sd@3,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C
root@opensolaris:~# zpool replace naspool c8t2d0 c9t1d0
root@opensolaris:~# zpool status naspool
 pool: naspool
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
 continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
 scrub: resilver in progress for 0h0m, 0.00% done, 0h0m to go
config:

 NAME           STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 naspool        ONLINE       0     0     0
 raidz1       ONLINE       0     0     0
 c9t0d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
 replacing  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t2d0   ONLINE       0     0     0
 c9t1d0   ONLINE       0     0     0  32.5K resilvered
 c8t3d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t5d0     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

And go make a coffee until it’s finished resilvering, then add the next disk:

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status naspool
 pool: naspool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: resilver completed after 0h2m with 0 errors on Sun Oct 11 10:00:17 2009
config:

 NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 naspool     ONLINE       0     0     0
 raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
 c9t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c9t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0  9.78G resilvered
 c8t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t5d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
root@opensolaris:~# zpool replace naspool c8t3d0 c9t2d0

And so on, until you’ve changed them all out, and then do a quick reboot to force the zpools to update to the new sizes.

root@opensolaris:~# zpool list
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
naspool   200G  39.1G   161G    19%  ONLINE  -
rpool    7.94G  3.43G  4.51G    43%  ONLINE  -

However, at the time of writing, there seems to be a little problem where when your zpool is resized, your zfs filesystem isn’t. So even though my zpool is currently showing 200G of space, my zfs filesystem is still its original size:

root@opensolaris:~# zfs list
NAME                       USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
naspool                   29.3G   118G  32.9K  /naspool
naspool/movies            29.3G   118G  29.3G  /naspool/movies
naspool/music             28.4K   118G  28.4K  /naspool/music
naspool/photos            28.4K   118G  28.4K  /naspool/photos

I’m currently researching a solution to this problem which doesn’t involve creating a new filesystem and moving all the files over from the old one.

Update: It seems that once you’ve created a raidz filesystem, you cannot modify how large it is. But there are ways around it. Check this article for info.

The main reasons to choose Opensolaris are simple:

• Common PC hardware is all you need. No propriatary disk bay system.
• Gigabit Ethernet. Well, providing your network card and switch support it.
• Cheap, redundant disk arrays with ZFS, the Opensolaris RAID-like filesystem.
• Quick and easy setup.

In a nutshell; it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s simple. So on the upside you won’t need to spend a great deal of cash to get yourself a nice NAS, but you might miss out on a feature or two.

So let’s get started. I’ll be building my Opensolaris server in VMWare, as it means I don’t have to go breaking any of my physical servers while I’m writing this howto. First thing I’ll do is set up some hardware which will hold the basic system. I’ll go with a single processor, 1Gb of RAM, and a single 8Gb hard disk for the operating system. Normally we’d have more, but for the purposes of this demonstration it’ll do.

Next, I’ll add the Opensolaris ISO as the CD image, and fire it up. Enter your keyboard and language settings as required and the next thing you’ll see is the Solaris desktop.

You’ll notice that it looks a heck of a lot like Ubuntu, Fedora and countless other Linux distributions, mainly because of the fact that it uses Gnome as its desktop environment the same as they do. But under the hood, things are a completely different kettle of fish. We’ll get to that shortly.

Next, double click the ‘Install OpenSolaris’icon to get started. Hit next on the welcome screen (unless you really want to read the release notes):

Disk settings. I’m going to select to use the entire disk, as I don’t really want to mess about with partitioning disks just yet. On my production server, I installed to a single disk, then mirrored that disk to a second of the same size to provide some redundancy.

Choose your Timezone.

Choose your Language.

Enter a root password and create an account for yourself. You can also set a hostname for your computer, but I’m going to be unimaginative and leave it as opensolaris.

Confirm your settings, then press install to get started.

And we’re away!

After about ten minutes, your installation will finish and your computer will ask you to reboot into its new environment. Log in with the details you entered before and you’ll drop in to your new desktop.

Fire up a terminal (it’s the black icon in the top bar) and we can start doing some poking around. Before we do, though, we need to become an administrator. Enter the pfexec su – to become root.

astro@opensolaris:~$ pfexec su -
Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.11      snv_111b        November 2008
root@opensolaris:~#

Let’s look at what our disks are doing. Solaris gives you two very powerful tools to control your disk arrays: zpool and zfs. Zpool is for controlling a pool of disks, and zfs is for controlling the filesystems which live on your zpool.

So to check our current array, we’ll execute zpool list:

root@opensolaris:~# zpool list
NAME    SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool  7.94G  3.21G  4.73G    40%  ONLINE  -

Excellent. We’ve got a pool named ‘rpool’which is just under 8Gb in size, and is healthy. Which disks are there?

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status rpool
 pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

 NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Well, only one disk. Not too good for a NAS server, is it? Let’s shut down our machine and add some more disks to play with.

I’m going to add four 10Gb virtual disks to my server, but if you were building a real machine you’d be opening up your server and plugging in your shiny new disks. Either way, when we reboot there’ll be a bunch of new storage media for us to play with. Once you’re done installing, fire up your server once again.

Once you’re back in, open up a terminal and become root again by typing pfexec su -, then type format to show your new disks.

root@opensolaris:~# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
 0. c8t0d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@0,0
 1. c8t1d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@1,0
 2. c8t2d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@2,0
 3. c8t3d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@3,0
 4. c8t4d0
 /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@4,0
Specify disk (enter its number):

Use control C to exit this section, as we don’t want to run the risk of damaging c8t0d0 – our system disk, which we know from the zpool status we did earlier. The new disks we just added are listed from c8t1d0 through to c8t4d0.

Ok, so we don’t want to add these new disks to our existing system pool. We want to create an entirely new pool just for our NAS. So let’s do that, and add the new disks we’ve just added.

root@opensolaris:~# zpool create -f naspool raidz c8t1d0 c8t2d0 c8t3d0 c8t4d0

By executing that command, we’ve said that we want to create a new pool of disks called ‘naspool’which is in RAIDZ1 format. You could use RAIDZ2 if you wanted dual disk redundancy (up to 2 disks can fail before you need to start worrying), but for me, having single disk redundancy is fine.

Let’s see what that pool looks like now:

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status naspool
 pool: naspool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

 NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 naspool     ONLINE       0     0     0
 raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 c8t4d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Excellent. All online and ready to go. But so far we’ve only created the disk pool. Now let’s build some filesystems on top of it. Because I like keeping things in their own little realms, I’m going to create three shares:

 root@opensolaris:~# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed mediapool/music
 root@opensolaris:~# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed mediapool/photos
 root@opensolaris:~# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed mediapool/movies

Excellent. Three folders should be enough for now. What does that look like?

root@opensolaris:~# zfs list
NAME                      USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
naspool                   254K  29.3G  32.9K  /naspool
naspool/movies           31.4K  29.3G  31.4K  /naspool/movies
naspool/music            28.4K  29.3G  28.4K  /naspool/music
naspool/photos           28.4K  29.3G  28.4K  /naspool/photos

Fantastic. We’ve now got about 30Gb of striped and paritied data to play with. On my production server it’s more like 3Tb, but that’s a story for another day.

Ok, so we’ve got the storage, but now we need to be able to access it. Let’s turn on filesharing for the NAS. Fire up your package manager, then search for smb and install the following packages:

Reboot to make the changes take effect, then log back in and become root again. Enable the smb server by performing the following command:

root@opensolaris:~# svcadm enable -r smb/server
svcadm: svc:/milestone/network depends on svc:/network/physical, which has multiple instances.

Ignore the output, as it’s merely diagnostic. Now let’s join a workgroup:

root@opensolaris:~# smbadm join -w WORKGROUP
After joining WORKGROUP the smb service will be restarted automatically.
Would you like to continue? [no]: yes
Successfully joined WORKGROUP

Replace WORKGROUP with whatever you’ve got your home network named as. Next, we’ll set up the authentication system:

root@opensolaris:~# echo "other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn" >> /etc/pam.conf

And turn on SMB sharing on our NAS shares and give them some names which mean something:

root@opensolaris:~# zfs set sharesmb=name=Movies naspool/movies
root@opensolaris:~# zfs set sharesmb=name=Photos naspool/photos
root@opensolaris:~# zfs set sharesmb=name=Music naspool/music

Then make sure that your account has access to read and write as it pleases:

root@opensolaris:~# chown -R astro /naspool

Finally, update your password.

root@opensolaris:~# passwd astro
New Password: <password>
Re-enter new Password: <password>
passwd: password successfully changed for astro

Excellent. Our shares are all set up and ready to go. Let’s add them to Windows. Open up an explorer window and type \\opensolaris, or whatever your computer name was. You can also use the IP address if you want to.

When the authentication window pops up, enter your account details and you should be greeted with the following wonderous sight:

And you should be able to copy all your files over with ease.

So what’s next? Well, next week we’ll look at how you can expand your Opensolaris NAS with more or bigger disks to make a truly inexhaustable supply of storage awesome.

See you next time!

But I think it’s time I re-kerjiggered this joint. Any suggestions?

When I started playing World of Warcraft around four years ago, I would never have imagined that a video game could dominate my life. I thought I was just sitting down to play a game, but I was wrong. Very wrong.

World of Warcraft, for those who don’t know, is a video game. It’s set in a vast, virtual fantasy world where the goodly Alliance is battling the insidious Horde. Where mighty dragons lurk in dungeons, waiting to be challened by brave adventurers. You begin by choosing between the two sides, picking a race, sex and class, and are dumped into the middle of a starting area.

As you stumble  into the light, the first thing you see is a chap with a giant yellow exclamation point above his head – a questgiver. He charges you with the important task of killing boars, or something like that, and you’re off on your merry way. You’ll slaughter the boars, pick through their corpses for anything good to sell, then turn in the quest item for a nice little reward. Doing this gains you experience, and very soon a swirl of yellow light engulfs your body as you become stronger and smarter – you’ve reached level two.

So it goes. You’ll slaughter thousands of creatures, both beast and humanoid. You’ll be sent on quests where you have to find something and bring it back to the questgiver, presumably because he’s either too lazy to do it himself, or his feet are glued to the ground so he can ask the next poor sap to go and do the same thing. Sadist. You’ll be asked to escort someone out of a hostile area, generally a painful experience because even though you probably have a mount and are capable of moving at twice normal speed, the escortee will refuse to move at any speed above ‘dawdle.’

Finally you reach level eighty, and you’re finished. You’ve won the game. Right?

Wrong. The game has just begun. Now instead of experience, you need to acquire something else. Honour. Reputation. Gold. Epic armour and weapons. Novelty pets to show off to your friends. And every single one of these things requires hours of time to achieve.

Now I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy my time playing World of Warcraft. Not by a long shot. In fact, I had a fantastic time. The people I met and the experiences I had while projected into this virtual world were, for the most part, an absolute blast. At the end, I was the leader of one of the most respected end-game raiding guilds on the server.

But yesterday evening, my girlfriend and I decided that it was time for us to hang up our digital hats and move on to the next challenge. Essentially the reason for this is that we reliased that we weren’t the masters of the game any more – it was now the master of us. Everything else in our lives had taken a back seat, and things like walking the dogs had to wait because we were busy doing something on World of Warcraft. Shelves full of books gathered dust, gardens overgrew, friends started wondering if we’d left the country or something.

After making the decision, we jumped online. After the login screen, a list of your characters greets you. Their armour glistening as they await your commands. But instead of pressing “Enter World,” we clicked on the other button on the screen – Delete. Watching as each of the characters you have spent days building disappears into digital oblivion is both terrifying and incredibly satisfying. After all, my main character has almost two thousand hours of my life poured into him. That’s thirteen hundred films. Fifty-four hundred television episodes. Two hundred novels. A three-year university course.

That was the scary one for me. A friend who is doing an Information Technology degree currently does two eight hour days per week, as well as a couple of two hour lectures. Over the course of a three year degree, that would total up to about eighteen hundred hours. I could have done that and had two hundred odd hours left over to read some books and see a couple of films.

So here I am. Facing the world anew with an extra fourty-odd hours per week. Whatever will I do with my time? Stay tuned and find out.