solaris

As I originally blogged, I was hoping to use EMC snapshots to perform server-less/network-less backups. EMC provides two main tools for managing snapshots in this type of situation:

• EMC Replication Manager
• EMC PowerSnap Networker Module

The PowerSnap Module supposedly automates taking snapshots for the purpose of backups, while Replication Manager supposedly provides a much more robust package.

With Replication Manager you might create a policy to take a snapshot every five minutes, keep the last 10, and use those for backups whenever necessary.

To make a long story short, Replication Manager is useless for LUNs with ZFS. According to EMC, this won't change in the near future. PowerSnap also has no support for taking snapshots of LUNs with ZFS on them so basically EMC has no server-less backup offerings for Solaris with ZFS.

January 18, 2010

I've been paying a lot of attention to this site since I switched platforms and somehow people are finding some fairly irrelevant content on my site for the search terms making path persistent in solaris 10 so I figured I better put some real answers up.

December 07, 2009

Recently I started using SmartSVN running remotely on a Solaris 10 server and displaying on my Windows XP machine via Xming (the free Xserver). I quickly ran into some performance and usability issues which I hope to have solved.

November 18, 2009

UPDATE: No ZFS Support for Replication Manager in the near future

Using storage level snapshots can be used to run backups without directly requiring resources from the original host.

EMC Replication Manager coordinates the creation of application consistent snapshots across all the hosts in your network. It handles scheduling creation/expiration of snapshots,  mounting and unmounting from backup servers, etc. from a single console.

Although it is not tightly integrated into EMC Networker like the similar Networker PowerSnap module, it can be used to start a backup process after taking a new snapshot and it has the capability to manage snapshots unrelated to backups from a GUI.

While the data sheet claims support for Solaris, there are several caveats which I have run into.

November 16, 2009

Someone currently building an internal development environment required some integration between servers using SSH and the webservd user.

He came to me when he saw that the default home directory for the webservd user is /.  He didn't want to create a /.ssh/authorized_keys file and I didn't blame him. My first reaction was to change the home directory but I didn't want to break something so I opened up Google and found something incredible.

DISCLAIMER: The following is quoted from documentation at docs.sun.com (emphasis is mine). I do not recommend you actually listen to it's instructions:

November 16, 2009