Sunday, October 23, 2011

Thoughts on a beta release of EON ZFS Storage

It's been a while since the last EON release but we are almost there. It's been a road of many trials with IPS and patience from the EON community but we are almost at a polished new release. I'm planning a beta release based on Openindiana/Illumos 151 bits. The beta will give the community a chance to provide feedback, input and possibly changes (bugs what bugs) for the actual release.
There are numerous improvements and binary additions with 151 (dladm, ipadm, smbstat, dtrace 1.7, etc). With these changes, come additional dependencies and an increase in package size, which goes against EON's goals.

Here's a current list of changes. Of course I'd like to hear your input, feedback and comments.
Perl has been moved to the binary kit. For memory size considerations, better performance and a user modifiable perl, it was shifted from the EON (embedded) to a wget install. The version of perl has changed from 5.8.4 to 5.10.0.
Pros: Lower memory footprint, better performance, user modifiable perl, full version.
Cons: The binary kit is no longer optional, it's now a requirement.
Options: Stick with the minimal perl bits required for (kstat, lgrpinfo, psrinfo, etc to work)

The Samba version of EON has grown considerably in size (approx 100Mb). This has me thinking to go with a pure storage OS model which means pushing Apache to the binary kit. So, Apache web server, would be a wget added choice along with nginx and lighttpd.
Pros: Lower memory footprint, better performance, two less image to release.
Cons: Future web admin (any takers) would require some kind of CLI kickstart.
Options: Leave apache embedded and Samba users basically eat the memory footprint.

Update 11.21.11: Compile-a-thon this past weekend new Binary Kit 75% complete, included goodies so far, Transmission bit torrent, Netatalk AFP(LION compatible), FFMPEG, RTMP server ...

Update 12.02.11: Re-compile-a-thon on again. Found some lib linking errors that requires a massive redo of most of the binary kit. Updated/Added APCupsd, SABnzbd and Sickbeard ...
Thanks to all EON users who have sent in feedback on how EON Storage is working for you. EON will continue allowing to, store it your way.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

The Definition of Innovation

Wednesday October 5th, 2011 marks a dark day, as the world lost a true technologist. He showed us that "innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower". "The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it". He lead by example, walked the talk and delivered unmatched standards of quality and excellence in what he shared. I never had an opportunity meet him, but "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with" him. For all you shared, Thank You Steve ...