As I was having another (un-successful) crack at getting a disk controller (other than the motherboard’s IDE controller) to work with Nexenta Core v2, I’d again forgotten how I was meant to discover the disks as-probed by the OpenSolaris kernel.

Of course, Nexenta includes Ubuntu Hardy’s userland tools, but anything kernel/device-related is still very different to what I’m used to.

I finally found a particularly well-written post by Pascal Gienger, whom notes that:

First we will try to look up the disks accessible by our system:

# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
1. c1d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@0,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

Type CTRL-C to quit “format”.

If your disks do not show up, use devfsadm:

# devfsadm
# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
1. c0d1
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@1,0
2. c1d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@0,0
3. c1d1
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@1,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

You’ll notice that the virtual disks are mapped as IDE/ATA drives, so the disk device names don’t have a target specification “t”.

Which has helped me to finally find out that my second-hand (i.e. ‘borrowed’ from an old work machine) Adaptec RAID card, doesn’t work with Nexenta Core v2. Still, Core v3 will be out in a few months – maybe I’ll try again then.

Also worth noting, as it may be useful, iostat -En prints out similar information useful when searching for disks to use with ZFS.

Further still, they’re touting the fact that the OWA now has all of the features the regular Outlook desktop does!

Does this not strike anyone else as a move that would make Windows (and Office, particularly since itself and OpenOffice will by then both have full ODF compatibility) completely obsolete? Why would you pay for a Windows 7 site license, when you can upgrade your Exchange server to 2010, replace all of the Windows machines with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Firefox 3.1 and OpenOffice, and save your company thousands of pounds?

On top of this, they’ve supposedly tuned 2010 to be ‘less bursty’ in the way that it accesses the disk, as well as adding JBOD concatenation support. Does anyone else see that as ‘Please virtualise your Exchange servers’? Yep, so did I.

I suppose you could be running HyperV, but with Microsoft supporting iterations of Windows Server under RedHat Xen virtulisation, I really don’t see how they’re going to convince people to pay for their the majority of their bread-and-butter products, once Exchange 2010 débuts.

What’s next? Windows 7 released under the Microsoft Public License? Perhaps they’ll just call it ‘Windows Azure Client’ when they give it away for free…

Plenty of drive bays there (24 to be exact).

Here you can see how neat it is. Partly because of the good design of the case, and partly because of the tight integration with Supermicro’s own boards. The shroud that ducts air over the CPU also works wonders.

As you can imagine, it sounds like a jet taking-off when it’s going at full pelt. I wonder if co-los typically have an ‘upper noise limit’?

I’ll put more detail down about what I’m doing with it a bit later… I’m currently testing all manner of Solaris-based distributions (a learning experience in its own right) with some funky zpool configurations. More to come!