It’s April, and there’s no sign of OpenSolaris 2010.03. I ran into a couple of CIFS authentication issues with snv134 and was hoping to test with 2010.03. Hopefully we’ll see OpenSolaris 2010.04, but the Oracle acquisition has me a bit worried…
On a semi-related note, the limited S.M.A.R.T. monitoring support in OpenSolaris is frustrating. I recently had an issue with a couple of drives in my file server: occasionally, I’d see delays of a few seconds while reading from disk (which, annoyingly, translates to a pause in whatever Blu-ray movie I might be watching at the time). When the delays occurred, iostat would show the failing drive doing nothing, but sitting at 100% busy. This was accompanied by a rapid seeking noise coming from the drive — a great clue had I been within earshot of the server. I replaced the drives and everything is back to normal.
I’ve seen this type of issue in the past, but was able to diagnose/alert on it based on S.M.A.R.T. error messages/counts. Can’t do this with OpenSolaris… Maybe this will improve in the future, but my current solution, for this specific problem, is to simply watch for it with the following command:
iostat -xen 1 | awk '{if ($10 == 100 && $1 + $2 < 5) print strftime("%m/%d/%y"), $0}'