jedlin.com

I have had my ZFS home server up and running for a few months now, but it was no easy endeavor to get it working the way I wanted it to.  I don't know how much of the difficulty was from trying to treat Solaris like it was linux, or if Solaris just doesn't do some things very well.  I figure since I have fought the battles, I may as well share some of what I have learned.

Distro Choice

This should have been easy, after all Solaris is Solaris right?  There are 3 main distributions to look into, Sun Solaris 10, Solaris Express Community Edition (Project Nevada), and OpenSolaris.

• Sun Solaris 10 - Distributed by Sun (Tested, Tried, Stable)
• Solaris Express Community Edition - Based on OpenSolaris, 2 week release cycle, next gen Solaris
• OpenSolaris - Open source Solaris distro, tries to compete with Linux in the desktop market

Now that I learned a little about the main distros, I have to make a choice.  This proves to be the most difficult part and I am still fighting with myself over which distro I like best.

I have ordered the parts for my new home server, the goal is to end up with about 3TB of redundant storage. More details to follow.

The Xserve at work has been a wonderful server that never gives us trouble and the Apple customer support for it has been even better than that.

I wish that were true.