Thursday, July 30, 2009

A Win Followed By Another Problem

Yay! I googled and googled and googled and eventually found a few blogs with useful information and guides to get Windows to see OpenSolaris shares, and if Windows can do it, the Mac can.

If you've happened on this page looking for the answer I found, I apologize. It was like 4am when I got it working and I went to sleep pretty much immediately but I'll post a few pages from the history that I think were helpful.... I was pretty tired.

A good place to start if you're just considering using OpenSolaris for NAS (network access storage)
Simons Blog:A Home Fileserver using ZFS
I started following the guide at:
Corner 11:Adventures in Opensolaris - Build a ZFS pool as a network share
but he got a bit vague on a couple of steps but got me most of the way.
This one cleared up the steps I was having problems with.

Anyway, the point is that after yet another fresh install of OpenSolaris and lots of reading and typing terminal commands, I can now access my ZFS File server from my Mac. That's what the "Yay!" was about.

I've only been playing with OpenSolaris for about a week now in it's painfully obvious to me that I still have a lot to learn. A fact that hit home hard when I tried to copy something onto the file server. I couldn't. In fact, I couldn't even copy a file to the ZFS volume from OpenSolaris. So my next challenge is to decipher folder permissions. I think I have a clue... it's starts with chmod.

I'm sure there's a whole lot more reading and probably some lengthy terminal sessions involved... Mick suggested that I visit a OpenSolaris IRC Chat Room, a suggestion I took about a day before I received. OpenSolaris comes with Pidgin - a multi service chat client (like MSN or GoogleTalk but more useful) and checking out the IRC channel (#opensolaris at Freenode.net) was what I was doing while googling.

Is it too soon to say googled with a little 'g'?

I like to scope an IRC channel before I blurt out a question - especially a channel full of techies. I've worked as a computer tech so I know what it's like to be asked stupid questions - often the same questions from different people, and some tech-type channels have rules like "Don't ask questions that are already answered in our FAQ" and "No Noobs". So I said "hi" when I entered and sat back to see if I could understand what everyone was saying, to see if I had learned enough to jump into a conversation.

Considering OpenSolaris is kind of like the 'in-development-bleeding-edge' version of Sun Solaris, it wasn't surprising that these guys were talking like programmers and developers, not a newbie helpline.

Still, I might ask them about chmod... nah!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Jon,

Better than using chmod etc is to set up your ZFS file systems so that permissions are inherited and propagated to all child directories and files automatically without further operator intervention.

See this for an idea of what I mean:
http://breden.org.uk/2009/05/10/home-fileserver-zfs-file-systems/

Cheers,
Simon

Unknown said...

ZFS ACLs are what to use, but you're right that chmod is the way to apply the ACLs. See link above in previous comment where examples of setting the ACLs are shown.

Cheers,
Simon