Windows recognised iscsi drive as RAW (no longer as NTFS)

After connecting my iscsi F-drive from one pc to another it was no longer recognised being formatted as NTFS so Windows asked if I wanted to format the F-drive (strange because I did not touch the data ...)
I went to the command prompt and did:
D:\> CONVERT F: /fs:ntfs
Where F: is a name of the drive you want to convert. It reported back that the drive was already NTFS.
I than ran: chkdsk F: /F which fixed it. After that it was immediately accessible as a normal Drive including all the data.

realtime monitoring your zfs pool

I use the following command to see real time transaction per 5 sec on my pool extra:

# zpool iostat -v extra 5

               capacity     operations    bandwidth
pool        alloc   free   read  write   read  write
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
extra       8.87G  28.4G    134      0  9.47M      0
  c7d0      8.87G  28.4G    134      0  9.47M      0
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----

(note: this was during a file copy over 100Mb/s LAN, reaching the max throughput of such a LAN)

To check local disk performance on my zpool I used:
# time (mkfile 2g /extra/foo)
real    2m7.349s
user    0m0.017s
sys     0m1.247s
(this creates a random file foo of 2GB  in my zpool extra and shows the time to complete)

package manager failed with update from snv_129 to snv_130

I had my pkg publishers as followed:
dev                   http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/   
opensolaris.org  http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release/

But this just results in pkg refresh failing:
-To correct the repository origin, execute the following command as a privileged user:

pkg set-publisher -O opensolaris-dev

To add a new publisher using this publisher's repository origin, execute the following command as a privileged user:

pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/

After the new publisher has been added, this one should be removed by executing the following command as a privileged user:

pkg unset-publisher opensolaris-dev

I tried to follow the suggestions but to no avail.
Then I read it was mentioned to have only 1 publisher opensolaris.org as Preferred and delete dev resulting in the following pkg publisher:
opensolaris.org   http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/ 

But still the package manager failed to upgrade to 130 as did pkg refresh
In the forum (http://www.pubbs.net/opensolaris/200912/32545/) it was mentioned to use "pkg image-update -f"  due to errors related to release snv-128 and 129 (Option -f bypasses SUNWipkg)

Update succeeded to 130.

3com 3C200-T Gigabit network card (tcge)

I was not happy with the throughput using the onboard NIC so I installed the 3com Gigabit NIC which supports jumbo frames. NIC is not recognized by OS as standard so you have to get the driver from Asustek:
http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/lan/3com/3c940/046_Solaris.zip

Just follow the instructions provided and your NIC will be recognized and fully functional.

iscsi performance

Besides the settings mentioned in the iSCSI uguide from Microsoft: Setting TcpAckFrequency =1

Someone mentioned lack of performance was solved by disabling the "receive Windows auto tuning". See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947239

Server refused to allocate pty snv_128 and 129

after upgrade to snv_129 I was not able to login using ssh.

this is a known bug which can be solved by editing /etc/minor_perm
add the following:
"clone:ptmx 0666 root sys" to /etc/minor_perm

After reboot you can login again with ssh
(source: http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=12380)