Recently I’ve found myself in need of having a local SmartOS image server; while Joyent has a datacenter in Amsterdam, it seems that images are still pulled from the US west coast. After trying various servers and even the plain nginx setup (though that doesn’t appear to work anymore with imgadm v3), I finally ran into dsapid. After a bit of research it turns out there’s bits and pieces of documentation scattered across the web, so here’s one page which tries to bring it all together.

SmartOS supports running Docker containers through Triton (SmartDataCenter). However I don’t have an entire datacenter at my disposal and the recommended specs for Triton are a bit more than the hardware I have available. I just want to run Docker containers on a single machine. A little bit of background: SmartOS supports running native Linux binaries in LX-branded zones through their Linux emulation. This is the base for regular LX-branded zones (behaves like a normal Solaris zone) and thus also allows for pulling images from the Docker Hub and running them unmodified.

Recently I started to experiment with SmartOS a bit more than my initial ooh, I a working zone…it’s nice weather today. So far I cannot help but feel that SmartOS feels Just Right. At one point I needed to spin up a bunch of OS zones where I didn’t care about their IP addresses, thus setting their ip to dhcp. All went well and they got addresses and everything worked, except for DNS.

Several times during the past weeks I’ve found myself in need of a particular tag for a Docker image on the Docker Hub. Upstream released their software and I wanted to deploy the container with the latest version. Of course you can keep reloading the Tags page to see if something new has shown up. So I wrote a little tool called docker-tags. It keeps track of images you want to followand when asked reports either:

For some inboxes there’s no reason to keep anything beyond a certain date. For example ports-changes@ isn’t too relevant to save the emails for an extended period of time. So slowly, but very surely, that mail folder reached 30k messages. While in the past I’ve manually deleted a full year of email by putting a weight on the d key (no kidding), there had to be a simpler way. Turns out there is with tagging.