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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I recently purchased a pair of Apple Xserve boxes for a project at work, with the goal of providing a functional Mac OS X desktop environment via our existing Sun Ray thin-clients. These two systems will be setup using Aqua Connect aka ACTS in a load-balanced, Windows Terminal Server like fashion. In order to make this production worthy, it needs to integrate well with my existing LDAP and NFS environment. Snow Leopard Server comes with its own built-in Open Directory based on OpenLDAP, but my LDAP instances are based on OpenDS.

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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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