Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group: The End?
I have tried so hard to be positive and encourage people... but I must bring sad news. The first of all OpenSolaris User Groups, the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group, may be ending, as we know it, at its final meeting in a Sun campus this Thursday, May 27th. According to SVOSUG leader, the lovely Alta Elstad, Oracle policy does not permit user groups to be run by Oracle employees or to meet on Oracle properties. Therefore, this ...
Understanding OpenSolaris & Its Governance
I've discussed this many times before, but the reality still alludes many in our community. Therefore let me speak plainly such that you may understand. OpenSolaris is not an open source project in the traditional sense. It can not and should not be thought of as such. If you attempt to do so you will only be frustrated and confused. We have today seen yet another example of such a misunderstanding, when a community member wished ...
Review: Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring
There are a lot of monitoring tools and frameworks out there. Some are expensive (such as HP OpenView) some are free (such Nagios). All of them have a niche to fill. Zenoss looks pretty. Nagios is will supported and highly extensible. Up.time and WhatsUp Gold are easy to get going. They've all got their thing. As such, I spend a lot of time evaluating and re-evaluating them. The one I circle back on most commonly is Zabbix. Zabbix ...
Spoofing an OpenSolaris X86 hostid
hostid's on SPARC are handy things because through the PROM they are tied directly to the hardware. On Solaris X86, not so much. They are "soft hostids", software emulated and essentially randomly generated. Because of this fact, it is easy for an upgrade or accidental deletion to wipe out the hostid and potentially cause you problems. This post applies only to Nevada based installs post-snv_100. Or, more specifically, following the ...
Creating an IPS Repository & Adding Your First Package
So IPS is here to stay, most likely, and you no doubt want to get a feel for things. So lets quickly create our first repository and package. Hold on just one second! Lets get this clear first, IPS is all about network package repositories. There is no "local package" file format. Therefore, its a little confusing to say "create a package". So lets be crystal clear: we are going to send a bunch of files and meta-data as a package ...
BFU, RIP
For those of you who may be unclear on what BFU is, it has become short for Blazing Fast Upgrades. The Solaris ("Nevada OS/Network Consolidation", to be specific) source traditionally had the ability to output BFU images, which are really just cpio archives that can be overlaid on an installed system. The idea was to allow developers to quickly and painlessly (as possible) update to the new builds without the usual patch hassles or doing a ...
The Case for IPS
On the list of those who hate IPS, I am the first. Even so, it is a very long list, and one that will grow longer and longer as it ceases to effect hobbiest and early adopters and becomes a reality in a proper Solaris GA release. While IPS has been around for some time now, only recently did I actually fully understand its purpose. In meeting with an engineer at Sun (whom I shall not name, but not directly involved with IPS) I started ...
No News is Bad News
A reader wrote today wondering why my entries have slowed down and there isn't a lot of news coming. Quite simply there isn't much to say. I've felt a need to return to blogging various smaller technical posts just to keep the blog on life support until something happens at Oracle. Larry ranted about Sun's problems to Reuters recently. Perhaps the only surprise was this: "More infuriating, says Ellison, is that Sun routinely sold ...
Splunk 4.1 is a Winner
Splunk 4.1 has arrived and really raises the bar for an already amazing tool. Several new key features have been added that make it worth an immediate upgrade: Integration with Industry Single Sign-On products, such as OpenSSO, Tivoli, Oracle Identity Management, etc. Event Level Workflows, such as opening a ticket or taking some action PDF Reports Event Extraction Live Dashboards and Views Real-time Search The big killer-app ...
The DTrace fsinfo Provider
If you've seen one of my talks on ZFS Tuning you've witnessed my love for the fsinfo provider (and the fsstat command as well) first hand. This amazing but poorly documented provider can give you some great high level insight into your I/O pattern. If you've ever used truss just to watch iops, then give this a whirl instead. There are probes for each VFS operation: ID PROVIDER MODULE ...