[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [discuss] Making OI friendly to new users
Rolf M. Dietze
rmd at orbit.in-berlin.de
Sun Aug 17 22:43:50 UTC 2025
ok, doubel parity might be a reason, but on the rpool? I only have
the OS installation on rpool, on systems with bigger rpools, there
might be /opt in the rpool as well. It is only a few thing written
to rpool, e.g. logs etc. User-date belongs in a diffrent place e.g.
nfs or local whatever redundant level of storage. But terrabytes
or rpool do sound a bit surprising for me. For instance, on file-
servers a 16GB compact flash or sd-card is plenty of storage and
fine, but that varies with what one wants to have in the rpool
And yes, I do need a bit more than the proposed 5 minutes, my mostly
USB2 USB-sticks aren't that fast and network speed is limited some-
where in between as well:)
regs, Rolf
Quoting Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss
<openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>:
> Simple. I wanted double parity for rpool but only single parity for
> spool, my scratch space. That allowed more space for spool. The
> benefit was 2.3 TB for rpool and 4.2 TB for spool. An extra 1.4 TB
> of scratch space.
>
> I'm a former reflection seismic research scientist/programmer. Many
> times I have come to work only to find that the overnight job had
> failed because I filled my dedicated 2 TB RAID filesystem in
> 2006-2007. Seismic eats space like people eat popcorn. I was
> creating models of the rock properties in the GoM, 600 miles EW, 300
> miles NS 6 miles deep sampled at 25 m horizontally and 200 ft
> vertically. This was a 9 month project with a brick wall deadline
> set by the Dept of Interior Minerals Management Services lease
> deadline. All cobbled together on the fly. There were about a dozen
> or so physical attributes for which I constructed those massive
> models.
>
>
> My redline for a job is "runs overnight". Things get hairy when you
> are looking at 1-2 week runtimes. Which are the norm for 3D seismic
> processing image formation runs. 50,000 cores in the cluster for the
> job.
>
>> zpool status
> pool: rpool
> state: ONLINE
> scan: scrub repaired 0B in 0 days 00:32:35 with 0 errors on Fri Jun
> 20 16:35:03 2025
> config:
>
> NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
> rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
> raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B78030Fd0s1 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B7002F3d0s1 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B700306d0s1 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B700305d0s1 ONLINE 0 0 0
> cache
> c5t001B448B48E32A6Dd0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
>
> errors: No known data errors
>
> pool: spool
> state: ONLINE
> scan: scrub repaired 0B in 0 days 00:01:16 with 0 errors on Fri Jun
> 20 16:03:58 2025
> config:
>
> NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
> spool ONLINE 0 0 0
> raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B78030Fd0s3 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B7002F3d0s3 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B700306d0s3 ONLINE 0 0 0
> c0t5000039A7B700305d0s3 ONLINE 0 0 0
> cache
> c5t001B448B48E32A6Dd0s1 ONLINE 0 0 0
>
> errors: No known data errors
>>
>
> Have fun!
> Reg
> On Sunday, August 17, 2025 at 01:25:02 PM CDT, Rolf M. Dietze
> <rmd at orbit.in-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
>
> well, I must admit, I am a bit dazzled by your installation
> problmes as since I read this post of yours on a freshly
> installed OpenIndiana box. What am I mising. Hardware is a
> Dell lOptiplex 9020 that prtdiag lists as:
> System Configuration: Dell Inc. OptiPlex 9020
> BIOS Configuration: Dell Inc. A25 05/30/2019
>
> ==== Processor Sockets ====================================
>
> Version Location Tag
> -------------------------------- --------------------------
> Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz SOCKET 0
>
> ==== Memory Device Sockets ================================
>
> Type Status Set Device Locator Bank Locator
> ----------- ------ --- ------------------- ----------------
> DDR3 in use 0 DIMM3
> DDR3 in use 0 DIMM1
> DDR3 in use 0 DIMM4
> DDR3 in use 0 DIMM2
>
> ==== On-Board Devices =====================================
> "Intel HD Graphics"
> NETWORK_NAME_STRING
>
> ==== Upgradeable Slots ====================================
>
> ID Status Type Description
> --- --------- ---------------- ----------------------------
> 1 available PCI Exp. Gen 3 x16 X16
> 2 in use PCI Exp. Gen 2 x1 X1
> 3 available PCI PCI
> 4 available PCI Exp. Gen 2 x4 X4
>
>
> well ok, it is a cheap all purpose business desktop system
> with internal IntelHD some 32G Ram an a quad core i5 at 3.3GHz
> not that sophisticated, but it runs well. It has 2 internal
> SSDs used as a mirrored rpool, $HOMEs are supplied via NFS
> from a Dell PowerEdge R720 (Openindiana as well) with two
> SSDs for rpool mirror and 16 disks set up as raidz3. I had
> to flash the controler so that I can use zfs insted of the
> Dell internal what ever raid. If you count the number of
> disks, well, I removed the dvd rom and tape and did put the
> SSDs there.
> For software side, I threw away the mate stuff, cause I
> personally don' t like it, I went with xdm as login manager
> and whatever flavor of twm, fvwm etc. There is a decent firefox
> runnig thanks to Carsten. This was important cause we run a
> lot of web based applications here. I added gcc4, gfortran
> and gnu-ada as packages from opencsw, as well as texlive,
> xfig, xpdf etc from other sources. It took about 2 hours or
> so, to set the box up. Mostly I use the tet installer, time
> to time I start up the gui-installer for installations,
> which is slower.
>
> I must admit, I just used the supplied installer, clicked
> thru it to install the os on one disk and set up the rest
> later on by script. Most things I took from the package
> server of Openindiana, I don't even have to create a manifest
> for xdm any more as it is supplied by now. It was just plain
> sailing going through the installer supplied.
>
> As I understood, you partitioned all of your 4 disks to have 2
> partitions per disk and creating one zpool with 4 partitions
> across all 4 disks and a second zpool set up by the other
> partitions across all 4 physical disks
>
> I am a bit puzzled as of what advantage you do expect? As
> since if one disk fails, it is 2 pools being affected, if 2
> disks do fail, the box is gone. Having rotating harddisks
> partitioned and the partitions in different pools, the pools
> limit one to the other in performance, having the disks heads
> jump around and of course, zfs disables the disk cache as
> in those configs as well. I wonder what benefits are left
> that I would imagine to be that interesting to accept this
> rather slow and low redundant configuration.
>
> Perhaps you tell a bit more on why this setup is preferred
> since well, why not put 2 rather small disks in an rpool
> mirror and if space is an issue, add an external diskarray
> but I guess, experimenting an a fileserver, aka need for
> lots of diskspace might not be an issue.
>
> Even with the SmartOS virtualizers I run, I boot them off
> a USB stick (not by net as supported) and have the zones
> running on the boxes internal disks in some kind of raidz
> config. If the USB stick fails, the virtualizers fall back
> to net boot. In fact somthing like auto client (a Sun product
> some times back) would be nice:)
>
> As said, I am a bit puzzled about your config. Please explain
>
> regards, Rolf
>
> Quoting Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss
> <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>:
>
>> I should like note that my battle with the installation process left
>> me so dispirited that I didn't actually bring the system online and
>> migrate onto it for over 2 years and was hobbling along on a Debian
>> 10 system I built just to provide remote support to a friend. When
>> Firefox started crashing constantly I finally started the move,
>> though I still have a lot of files to move so I can permanently
>> shutdown some of my systems.
>>
>> In my case I was building out a Z840 with space for 4x 4 TB HDs. I
>> wanted a RAIDZ2 rpool and a RAIDZ1 scratch pool. That meant i *HAD*
>> to make 2 slices on each drive. At the time I had 30+ years of
>> experience as a sys admin. 2-3 years of VMS on a mIcroVAX II "world
>> box" followed by years of Unix workstations of many flavors. I
>> presume setting up a new system will take several days. Several
>> weeks was a bit much.
>>
>> I've never lost a battle with a computer, but that ordeal left less
>> than eager to fight them. Especially poorly conceived and maintained
>> installers such as the current OI installer.
>>
>> Why is "Install to existing partition" not given as a option in the
>> installer? Desktop icons with no broken links is a huge FAIL. I know
>> some have been fixed, but IIRC when I tried the current installer on
>> a test system there were still icons with broken links. Fortunately,
>> "pkg update" worked well. If it had not I might well have abandoned
>> OI entirely and simply gone to S10_u8 in an air gapped environment.
>>
>> Before an installation disk image is created "SOMEONE* needs to test
>> it with a moderately complex configuration. Assume the user is a
>> competent admin. There should be no missing pieces. Ideally several
>> people should do it on different HW. I have several Z400s which are
>> set up to allow me to swap disks. I keep all my old disks just for
>> install testing. In the IDE drive case I have ~2 dozen old disks in
>> trays, but am no longer running any IDE systems. With a 3 disk
>> trayless SATA bay in a Z400 I can do reasonably complex setups. And
>> I have a talent for breaking installers.
>>
>> If I am given reasonable notice I should be able to do a test
>> install or two of varying complexity each time a new LiveCD image is
>> ready for release.
>>
>> If someone at my skill level has a problem with the install process
>> it is *badly* broken. The OI install process does not compare well
>> to Debian or any other distro. Someone with 20 years of Linux
>> experience is not likely to get a good impression of OI when they
>> hit broken desktop icons.
>>
>> Sadly, McNealy et al gave themselves such a lavish change of control
>> packages that IBM backed out and Oracle bought Sun instead. Having
>> built AIX to compete with SunOS IBM would not have abandoned it as
>> Oracle has. Suffice to say early AIX was less than robust. Not sure
>> about now as I've been far away from AIX for over 20 years. The
>> reason Linux is now dominant in several use contexts is the billion
>> dollars IBM committed to enhancements to Linux.
>>
>>
>> Have Fun!
>> Reg
>>
>>
>>
>> On Friday, August 15, 2025 at 09:10:34 PM CDT, Atiq Rahman
>> <atiqcx at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi Till,
>> Thanks for the reply.
>>
>>> I am not aware on the non-CSM UEFI issue
>> For me, this has been an issue. At present, the OI installer does not
>> present an option to install in UEFI system without dedicating a whole disk
>> to it.
>>
>> As a workaround, I am choosing *Install_to_ExistingPool* by pressing F5. If
>> you are following mailing lists you're probably seeing I am reinventing the
>> wheel: manually taking care of stuff the installer is not doing when that
>> option is chosen.
>>
>> New users might not have that much energy to go through all that to add an
>> OS (or they might call it distro) to their portable device.
>>
>> [snip]
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>> openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>> https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>
>
>
>
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