SA Pro: Episode 3
Just before the end of the year, the third episode of SA Pro, featuring a 1 hour interview with OmniTI Founder & CEO Theo Schlossnagle. SApro-Episode002 AAC SApro-Episode002 MP3 Its a bit long, I admit, but Theo is an amazing guy and refreshing to talk with. Fire it up while you tweek on something fun for New Years.
Crossbow Experiements and Elation
I wanted to play a little deeper with Crossbow, and in particular get my mind around Etherstubs and inter-stub routing. So I devised the following experimental architecture: Etherstub0 |----> vnic0 ---> zone001 |----> vnic1 ---> zone002 +----> vnic2 -- Etherstub1 +-> router01 |----> vnic3 --/ |----> vnic4 ---> zone003 +----> vnic5 ---> zone004 The ...
2008 Year in Review
Here it is, big post 1,000. I'm fairly proud of that given that the vast bulk of all my blog entries are technical and not just brainless linkdumps. There is still a lot to blog about and I've still written a great many entries that ended with "more to come...", never the less its a good milestone. Looking back at 2008, we've had a very good a productive year in OpenSolaris land. COMSTAR arrived, Crossbow arrived, ZFS is getting ...
Crossbow for Christmas
After 2 years of waiting, Project Crossbow has arrived! It integrated into Nevada Build 105 on Dec 4th, and BFU's became available around the middle of the month. SX:CE isn't available just yet, but should be up in about a week I hope. Crossbow is huge. This is a monumental improvement to Solaris and continues to push the bar out of reach of its competitors. Simply put, Crossbow redefines the nature of network virtualization. To ...
Merry Christmas
To all my fellow administrators, a very merry Christmas to you and yours. 'Carol of the Bells' by The Bird and the Bee Luke Chapter 2: In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 And all went to be registered, each to his own town. 4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from ...
OpenSolaris 2008.11 Properly Released
OpenSolaris 2008.11 is now fully and properly released. At opensolaris.com you'll find several video interviews, including Sun's all-star cast names like John Fowler, Tim Cramer, David Comey, and Dr. Stephen Hahn. There is a demo of Time Slider, Sun's time-machine like functionality added to GNOME's file browser which leverages ZFS snapshot navigation in an easy to use graphical way. There are also presentations with both Intel and AMD on ...
Ode to Dave
David Stewart, in a super-snazzy suit no less, at Tokyo Tech Days 2008, photo by Jim Gris. Is there a reason for this post? Nope... Intel Dave is just awesome. Anyone that can make me not hate Intel has got to have some kind of super powers.
OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released
The crew was so busy getting everything ready for OpenSolaris 2008.11 that they forgot to tell anyone they released it...... so, guess what: Download OpenSolaris 2008.11 Now! For a great run through of new features, especially from a desktop perspective, please watch Roman's excellent Whats New in OpenSolaris 2008.11 Screencast. I know the docs team spent a lot of time on the docs kit for OpenSolaris 2008.11, but I can't seem to find ...
SA Pro: Tom Limoncelli Interview
The 2nd SA Pro podcast has arrived... Tom Limoncelli, of Time Management for System Administators and The Practice of System and Network Administration fame, and I talk about his books, experience at Bell Labs, and time management in general in this 60 minute interview. Available in MP3, AAC, and OggVorbis, Download SA Pro here, or directly: Download in MP3 Format Download in AAC Format Download in OggVorbis Format Sp...
Thumpers and SMART: When You Suspect A Failed Disk
While not an uncommon problem for storage arrays, Thumpers (Solaris/ZFS) in particular are susceptible to "mostly dead" disk issues. This is a situation in which a disk has not failed but IO performance or log messages give you that gut feeling that a drive needs to be swapped out. One would think that Solaris FMA (Fault Management Architecture) should detect these and handle them, but until the Fishworks team made a series of putbacks to ...