Matt-J.co.uk : Ramblings

Had a great week at work this week! Have been helping install one of Sun’s new products into our lab (More on that in another post) and so this weekend, continuing the techy theme (and since I don’t really have enough money to go out :p) I decided to get on with a few of my projects. The first being update my solaris ZFS NAS box to the newest opensolaris build. (snv_72)

This all went fine, until I had to re-import my ZFS pool into the system, and apparnetly one of the drives was not there. This wasn’t a problem, as it’s a 3 Disk raid (and so the data was still accessible) however, I spent an hour or so trying to work out what was up (missing disks dev path looked quite strange so that lead me down a path of thinking it was a solaris/zfs issue)

But nope! Damn SATA Cables!
I don’t know who allowed the sata cable standard to be released without clips, but he/she should be shot… as now, some cables come with clips, and some without. Some motherboards have sata ports which allow cables with clips to clip into them, whereas some (Mine, don’t) Even different drives may / may not have anywhere for ‘clipped’ sata cables to clip in..

The result, VERY unreliable connections, especially if the drives have been moved around a couple of times, and the sata connections are not as tight as they were. I mean! WTF where they thinking ‘Ahh these cables are nice and small, no-one will care that they can slip out, everyone will just be happier they are faster than IDE!!’

Thats like buying a new BMW that looks better, is faster, and easier to drive… but sometimes the breaks may not work.. ahh well!
</rant>

Anyway, application of superglue to my sata cables has solved this issue, and my NAS is happy again.

My next task is getting solaris running under Xen, so I can use this server box (as it’s pretty powerful) to do other stuff, such as an OpenLDAP server, and a linuxMCE (distributed home media center) server.

Will let you know how it goes.

//Matt