Christopher Warner

A long time ago I used to run a bulletin board system (bbs). This was probably 1993-94 I was 14-15 at the time. Back then the internet was pretty useless for information and everyone did the bbs thing. I’m not going to say the bbs name or anything like that but I did a search and came across this article by Q. I’m pretty sure this was written long before it appeared in PIMP, actually I am quite positive. Anyway; it’s sad that you still can’t find good writing like this unless you read acm papers. Everything I know about the phone system I learned from Q and our conversations on tdb and tdf.. it’s been nearly a decade since last convo. It’s a long story i’m not gonna rehash here and i’m sure if you want to do the triaging you can find some pretty good reading about it; anyway.. I had this setup in my parents basement all those years ago.. I could probably still put one together… No one remembers red boxes, rainbow boxes, blue boxes.. those days are over.. everyone is all grown up now. The sad part is..  No one writes like this anymore….. .. .. or.. maybe I need to pay the wrc a visit and catch up. Formatting is fudged but you can search for the title of the paper for proper diagram formatting.

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So, you want the stability and redundancy of ZFS. You also want to use Apple’s Time Machine client but don’t want to buy apple kit in order to backup your files. I’m using Opensolaris in a JBOD setup to do this pretty easily. There are some good howto’s on doing this on the net for Linux. This howto in specific for Ubuntu is located here. It’s an excellent guide you can follow for doing the same on Opensolaris; however compiling netatalk on Opensolaris needs some modification and there is an excellent howto on doing this here. 

There are a couple of things to note. Opensolaris uses it’s own stack for mdns. When you get to the instructions on avahi you should not need to download or install this at all. There is a daemon called the avahi-daemon-bridge that essentially bridges avahi client calls for userspace clients like Ekiga that need it. So essentially you can skip that part of the instruction.

Opensolaris uses SMF (Service Management Framework) to manage it’s processes. So where you see things like “restart x process” in the guide you’ll be doing something like “svcadm restart FMRI” where FMRI stands for Fault Managed Resource Identifier.

That’s about it, note that you don’t need to use AFP at all. You can also just install Samba via OpenSolaris and create a share and have TimeMachine use that and it also works just as great!