If you are running Nexenta Core Platform (NCP) 3.x and have been on a different planet for a few months, you may not have heard that NCP was discontinued and Illumian was created to take its place. The nexenta.org website has since been repurposed and there were some problems with the previous community hosted apt.nexenta.org. This is somewhat unfortunate for anybody that is still running NCP3 with a need for the original package repository.

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I ran into a troublesome ZFS bug several months ago where a pool with a log device became “stuck”. The ‘zpool remove’ command would complete but would not remove the device. This was a bad place to be in, because the device was no longer usable, could not be removed, and would most likely prevent the pool from ever being exported and reimported again. Someone else had posted on the zfs-discuss mailing list about the same problem and put me in contact with George Wilson, who in turn put me on the right track to a successful workaround.

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I have been running VirtualBox on NCP for nearly a year now both in production and development environments, thanks to some earlier work by Ernst Gill. I’ve finally found the time to update his work for VirtualBox 4.0.6. I have unfortunately not had time to test this thoroughly so I’d appreciate feedback if you find something wrong with it. You can obtain the patch here.

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It has been about six years since I last upgraded my co-lo box that hosts a myriad of services and websites for opensource, business, friends, and personal hobbies. Now I have a new machine in place that should last at least another six years. A tremendous amount of thanks goes out to Andrew at NETPLEX for dealing with the inevitable problems that come up when you ship a machine nearly 1000 miles.

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I have re-established my local Nexenta repository and am making it available to the public. If you are interested in newer versions of Apache, PHP, and Samba compatible with NCP 2.x or 3.x then you’ll want to peruse apt.zpool.org. Some other tidbits include the latest stable BCFG2, a patched gamin package that supports Solaris FEN, and a working php5-imap package. These packages are pulled in from a variety of sources but most of them come from Debian (unstable).

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