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If you are a regular reader then you already know I recently picked up an iPod Touch recently. After a bit tinkering with the Power Mac G4 MDD I found that it just wasn’t going to be useful for me. What I really needed was something that could provide some of the same functionality as a laptop.

The laptop I currently have is in need of a new battery, it’d be the third in less than three years, I just couldn’t justify spending 130 for something that would die again in less than a year.

I also needed a new MP3 player, a way to play TV shows but not completely give up the ability to browse the web and check my email. So in comes the iPod Touch. It can play music, video,
browse the web and do email. And if that isn’t enough, you can download more software via the App Store. This post was in fact pecked out on the iPod Touch on screen keyboard. Sure I could do the same thing on a full blown laptop but it wouldn’t be nearly as portable and honestly, nearly as fun.

Browsing the web using Safari is actually a treat because it uses the same rendering engine as the same one used in Safari on the Mac. The on screen keyboard is surprisingly easy to use and even fixed your misspellings on the fly.

So far, after just a couple of days with it, I don’t feel like I’ve sacrificed much if anything at all. If you’re on the fence about whether or not an iPod Touch, or an iPhone, would be a sufficient laptop substitute I think you can rest easy knowing that yes, it definitly can be.

There are however some notable limitations. You can’t unload pictures from your digital camera and you are limited to a small screen, on screen keyboard and you’re tied into the iTunes ecosystem with no other options.

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I’ve heard from more than one person (one of them quite reliable) that new Macbooks are coming but I’ve also heard they are likely to be priced lower than we’ve seen them before. With the lack of attention the Mac mini has seen in the last year my tin foil hat is picking up ideas that the mini may be phased out in favor of the cheaper Macbook.

A number of people will want to point out that killing the mini wouldn’t make sense, they make great media center PCs or without the mini Apple won’t have anything to pull in those Windows users. But I’d argue that Apple needs only to improve upon the aTV to replace the mini as a media center. I’d also argue that laptops are where its at and more people are buying laptops than desktop systems these days. If a Windows users is on the fence on which computer to choose, you can bet that the two choices are between a Windows laptop and a Mac laptop.

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Virtualization. Despite being around for years it has suddenly become a hot topic today and it seems that everyone is trying to get a piece of the action. Sun is no different.

Virtualization has been around since the mainframe days but virtualization as we usually see today started with VMware (to the best of my knowledge). VMware has had available for years a few different products that allowed you to dedicate and entire machine to hosting virtual machines or simply run other operating systems on your desktop PC. Today’s computers are more powerful than ever before and even the cheapest of computers today typically has some power to spare. With the abundance of computers with excess power continuing to grow, it is no wonder virtualization has gotten to popular.

About a year ago VMware noticed that virtualization was getting more popular and decided that then was the time to really hook people. They released a free virtualization product (and since then some more) allowing people to run virtual machines on their computer for free.

Soon other virtualization techniques came to market, many of them also free. VirtualBox is one of them and is a relatively new entry into the virtualization market but is already showing some great promise. Unlike some other virtualization products, VirtualBox is cross platform covering the usual suspects like Windows, Linux and Mac. Of course, being from Sun it also runs on Sun’s Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems.

VirtualBox, while young, shows great promise and it is available for free (for personal using and testing). It brings together some of the things I love about VMware. Simple to manage, cross platform and easy migration from one host machine to another. Some of what VirtualBox adds is native iSCSI initiator support, Remote Desktop Protocol support for running virtual machines and the ability to run on Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris. It even supports the seemless mode seen in VMware’s Fusion and Parallels.

If you’re looking for a free way to get into virtualization then give VirtualBox a shot. I think you’ll be impressed.

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In all my playing with OpenSolaris and iSCSI I decided to give iSCSI using Linux and OS X another shot. Turns out the GlobalSAN iSCSI client for OS X, available for free from Studio Network Solutions, works much better than it did just a couple of months ago. Lock ups, so far, seem to be a thing of the past.

To make use of it I decided to pull the drive out of my external case and put it in my Linux system. I then exported it via the iSCSI Enterprise Target software (available here) already installed on the system. After installing the latest GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator software (available here)on my mini I was able to connect to the iSCSI Lun on my Linux machine.

So far I’m finding that I’m able to get nearly full speed out of the disk and am able to copy large files to the drive at around 44MB/s.

Update: One caveat I have found is it takes a lot longer for the Mac to enter sleep if it is connected to the iSCSI share.

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One of the first things I really hoped ZFS could do when I heard about it (and its ability to share using iSCSI) was the ability to resize things at will. Resizing file systems is something that has been possible for a while but it has never been this easy, at least in my mind. With the ability to resize storage volumes you can put a ton of disks into a single system and then share out exactly what is needed to your systems and then resize if you need more later on. Today I got a chance to test ZFS’s ability to resize volumes as well as how Windows handles the task.

Although the ability to resize file systems has been around for a while it has never been as easy as it is today. Linux has been able to resize file systems for some time and the latest versions of Windows provides the ability right in Disk Management. I run a number of Windows systems and the ability to resize NTFS iSCSI volumes is what I’m primarily interested in.

Click read more to learn how this is done. This isn’t a full how-to but more of an overview of how to make it all happen.

Continue reading

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Just a quick note on how to work with packages in OpenSolaris. pkg is used to manage packages.

pkg refresh

Will cause the system to refresh what packages are available.

pkg image-update

Will initiate a system upgrade.

pkg install SUNWiscsitgt

Will start an install OR upgrade of the SUNWiscsitgt package

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One of the things I need to test is using iSCSI to store data on some Windows servers. Here is a quick synopsis of how to create a storage pool and then create a ZFS dataset that can be shared using iSCSI

Create the pool from the available disks, if they don’t already exist. Be sure to read docs on what kind of pool you want to create. I’m using raid-z

zpool create raid-z test /dev/dsk/c0t1d0 /dev/dsk/c0t2d0 /dev/dsk/c0t3d0 /dev/dsk/c0t4d0

Create the data set and share it using iSCSI

zfs create -s -V40G test/iscsi
zfs set shareiscsi=on test/iscsi

You should now have 40GB of iscsi based storage available. Use iscsi-initiator on Windows XP/Vista/Server 2003 to attach to the iscsi target, assign a drive letter and format.