Burn - Boot - Store

Choose a EON ISO

Begin by choosing an appropriate EON image that matches your 32 or 64 bit hardware. If uncertain which EON image is best for you, start with a 32 "32-cifs-min" or 64 bit "64-cifs-min" CIFS(Common Internet File System) image.

Note: With "min" EON images, you can still add a web server. (Apache, Nginx or Lighttpd).

Download the EON ISO file

Download the latest EON version. Save the selected EON ISO file to a known location for burning to a blank or rewritable CD/DVD in the next step. The desktop is an easy location to find the file later.

Burn the ISO file to CD

Burning the ISO file may or may not require software to burn the "eon-0.600-130-64-cifs.iso" file to a blank CD, depending on your operating system (Win 7, XP, Mac OSX).

ImgBurn is a good, free, CD/DVD burning software for windows.

SimplyBurns is a good, free, CD/DVD burning software for Mac OS X.

Boot the CD

After burning the ISO file to CD. Place the CD in the machine where EON will be installed, and boot the machine.

Note: Installation (from CD to USB) can be performed on any machine. Does not have to be the machine where EON will run.

Login

If all the steps above went as designed, EON should boot and show a "login: " message.

Enter root at "login: " and eonsolaris at the "password: " prompt.

Testing the hardware compatibility (optional but recommended)

The follow commands help determine if the network card, hard disks/controllers and motherboard are recognized by EON.

check if the network card driver, (of the form e1000g0, bge0, iprb0, yukonx0) plus lo0 (loopback interface) is seen.

ifconfig -a

lo0: flags=2001000849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,VIRTUAL> mtu 8232 index 1

        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000

e1000g0: flags=1004843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,DHCP,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 2

        inet 10.72.xx.xx netmask fffffe00 broadcast 10.72.141.255

        ether b8:ac:6f:8b:19:52

check 32 and/or 64-bit availability. If you booted the 64-bit image and see only 32-bit reported, it means your hardware supports only 32-bit. If you booted 64 bit, should see 32 and 64 bit availability.

isainfo -v

64-bit amd64 applications

        vmx xsave sse4.1 ssse3 cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu

32-bit i386 applications

        vmx xsave sse4.1 ssse3 ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu

show hard disks attached/recognized by the system. The devices seen in the output are needed to help build your zpool later.

echo | format

show hard disks attached/recognized by the system (same as above) plus USB drives.

echo | format -e

show hard disk, USB and CD/DVD drives with manufacturer's info, temperature and more.

hd

show the number of CPU cores and model CPU.

psrinfo -pv

The physical processor has 2 virtual processors (0 1)

  x86 (GenuineIntel 1067A family 6 model 23 step 10 clock 3159 MHz)

        Intel(r) Core(tm)2 Duo CPU     E8500  @ 3.16GHz

list detailed hardware/BIOS information, ctrl-c to break and return to the command prompt.

smbios -t 1 | more

Install to USB/CF

If the testing phase went satisfactorily, proceed to installing EON to USB or Compact Flash. Why USB/CF? It's energy efficient "green", cost effective, writable and saves a hard disk port. Connect your USB media/drive to an available USB, and start the EON install using the following command:

Installs the EON STORAGE software to the USB media/drive.

install.sh

Boot or reboot the machine with USB/CF

Remove the CD and boot/reboot your machine with the USB/CF media.

Reboot the system and try to eject the EON CD while the machine is rebooting.

init 6

If all went well the machine will begin booting from USB/CF media. If not, please make sure your bios is properly set to boot from USB device first. Note: Some machines seem to have issues booting from some USB drives.

Login when the machine gets back to the "login: " prompt. Take some time at this stage, to configure the storage services you will use (eg: CIFS enabled by default, NFS, iSCSI will need to be enabled for use) and create/design your storage strategy. If you will only use Windows/CIFS storage, then you will not need to enable any services.

For EON version 1.0 and higher, perform all 5 steps below.

 cd /mnt/eon0/bin

 ./slinky r

 ./slinky c

For EON version 0.6 and earlier skip the 3 steps above.

(older version before 0.59.4 use setup.sh)

setup

"Update image" should be run before a reboot to preserve customization and other configuration changes. "updimg.sh" creates a backup at /mnt/eon0/boot/x86.eon.oem. It is recommended to keep the ".oem" image around in the event a reset or fresh setup is needed. The ".oem" image is accessible at boot from the "EON Storage OEM" choice.

updimg.sh

ZPOOL testing without disks (optional but a good exercise)

These steps are for extended testing purposes to learn by example. Depending on the amount of RAM in your computer, ramdiskadm could be used to simulate disks and create a test zpool. This is all dynamic and will be lost on reboot, so feel free to experiment.

shows a list of ramdisks created or in use

ramdiskadm

deletes the RAM disk named "ram1"

ramdiskadm -d ram1

creates a 200 MB RAM disk named "ram1". "ram1" will become a test disk for our test zpool. It's small but it just a temporary aid to test if EON works for you.

ramdiskadm -a ram1 200m

creates a zpool named abyss, from the RAM disk = ram1 created above

zpool create abyss /dev/ramdisk/ram1

create a ZFS filesystem = media on, zpool = abyss, casesensitivity has to be set at ZFS creation time

zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o sharesmb=on abyss/media

set the share name = media on the ZFS dataset abyss/media. This is the share name seen from the client OS.

zfs set sharesmb=name=media abyss/media

set zpool permission to full control for owner and read, execute for group and others

cd /abyss ; chmod 755 media

set owner = admin and group = stor on the abyss/media ZFS dataset

cd /abyss ; chown admin:stor media

for proper unix permission inheritance on files created from Windows (client OS)

chmod A+owner@:full_set:fd:allow,everyone@:read_set/execute:fd:allow media

Optional: enable gzip-1 compression. "gzip-1" is a good balance of compression ratio and CPU performance

zfs set compress=gzip-1 abyss/media

Optional: enable deduplication on ZFS dataset abyss/media. dedup=on is the same as dedup=sha256,verify

zfs set dedup=on abyss/media

Optional/recommended: files are created with permissions determined by inheritable access control entries, with execute[x] bits set

zfs set aclinherit=passthrough-x abyss/media

Optional iscsi test: create a thin provisioned 1TB volume. Though it's a 1TB volume, the real storage behind this is still only 200 MB

zfs create -s -V 1tb abyss/iscsi

set the passwd for user = admin also so that it will be recognized CIFS login

passwd admin

add the EON machine to your workgroup for sharing and you are ready to test a connection from your client OS

smbadm join -w workgroup

Next - Configs and zpools