Read the original article at Road War Story – Hacking Inflight Solutions

The 2am phone call

Last summer I got my call from the president at 2am.  Actually it was my former boss at Hollywood Reporter.  I had worked there three months previous, and they had since hired an outsourced DBA solution.  Big outsource, big chops.  And big fail.

12 hours to liftoff

I was scrambling to pack my luggage to go on summer vacation.  I was bound for SF at the moment and my flight was leaving in the morning.  I was trying to wrap up loose ends and my former boss was entreating me – “Can you help us?  …

Netapp, enterprise network attached storage devices with OS, Data ONTAP has a per volume specific variable called 'maxfiles'. Basically the maximum number of inodes the volume can consume independent of disk utilization.

Unfortunately this variable must be set per volume, it cannot be 'unlimited' and it cannot be downsized.

According to the man page:

DESCRIPTION
maxfiles increases the number of files that a volume can
hold, as close as possible to max. File inodes are stored
in blocks, and the filer may round the requested max num-
ber of files to the nearest block.

Once increased, the value of max can never be lowered, so
the new value must be larger than the current value.



Further increasing this value to be an unlimited-like variable consumes filer RAM and will result in less usable filer RAM after a Data ONTAP OS …

Please make it descriptive, graphic, and if anything burnt or exploded I'd love to have pictures.
Include an approximate timeline of when things happened and when it was all working again (if ever).
Thanks!

This somewhat relates to the earlier post A SAN is a single point-of-failure, too. Somehow people get into scenarios where highly virtualised environments with SANs get things like replication and everything, but it all runs on the same hardware and SAN backend. So if this admittedly very nice hardware fails (and it will!), the degree of "we're stuffed" is particularly high. The reliance in terms of business processes is possibly a key factor there, rather than purely technical issues.

Anyway, if you have good stories of (distributed?) SAN and VM infra failure, please step up and tell all. It'll help prevent similar issues for …

So… some colleagues have been experimenting with DTrace a bit, and I’ve been (for a while now) wanting to experiment with it.

The challenge now, instead of in the past, is that I’m setting up a Solaris based system - not getting one premade.

I chose OpenSolaris as I’d previously tried Solaris 10 and just sunk too much time trying to get updates and a development environment installed (another colleague could get the opposite to me going: he got devtools but no updates. at least mine was up to date and secure… but without a compiler).

So… OpenSolaris. It isn’t 100% open, there’s binary only drivers and such… but compared to previous Solaris, a whole lot better. Now, if only it was GPL licensed so we could have cross-pollination with Linux.

I grabbed the 2008.05 ISO as soon (in fact, slightly before) it was released and installed it in VirtualBox.

The installation was shiny …