Hard Drive Recovery 101
About 6 years ago or so I got tired of fixing problem with Tamarah Windows/Linux box and decided to pay the money for a 15" PowerBook. It was an excellent investment, she could work on the couch, no more lockups and reboots in Windows or mysterious "Bennnnnnn!" problems in Linux. Since then she's upgraded to a black MacBook, and when I joined Joyent they provided me with a MacBook Pro (which I'm typing on now). So far each of these 3 ...
Blastwave: Unofficial Update
I am in no way qualified to speak with regard to whats going on around Blastwave, but given that there are no official statements and lots of rumors and speculation I'll share some info. Please note that I consider both Phil Brown and Dennis Clark as friends and am completely impartial, at least for this post. If you've visited Blastwave.org recently you'll notice that parts of the site are "missing", you may also have noticed that ...
OpenSolaris Storage Summit 2008: San Jose
The first annual OpenSolaris Storage Summit is coming on Sunday, September 21st, to San Jose, to be followed by SNIA's Storage Developer Conference. This is really exciting. SNIA SDC is one of the best storage conferences in the world (along with USENIX FAST), and OpenSolaris is undoubtedly the more powerful storage platform on earth... this is an excellent opportunity to get a lot of excellent and rewarding information in a week and get ...
NFS Giant Leaves Sun
Spencer Shepler is leaving Sun. I am saddened to see him go. If you don't know Spencer's name, he's been an NFS giant for a long time and we all owe a debt of gratitude to him. Of his long list of accomplishments he is a a chair of the IETF NFSv4 Working Group and is the most prominent name on the NFSv4 RFC 3530. Make sure to keep your eyes on his new blog.
Solaris Kerberos Revisited
Some time ago I wrote a big blog entry entitled Simplifying Zone Management with Kerberos. Since that time (3 years ago!?!) several improvements and simplifications have come along to make life far more pleasant. If your new to Kerberos, please refer to my previous entry before proceeding with this one. Kerberos is still something I struggle to really wrap my head around. Thats probably due to the fact that I have never used it in a ...
Happy SysAdmin Day
Today is everyones favorite day of the year: SysAdmin Day! To all my fellow admins, from myself and Joyent, a very warm pat on the back and "thank you" for all that hard work that no one else acknowledges. So kick back, enjoy a cold pint, and bask in the glory that is UNIX Systems Administration!
WARGAMES IN THEATER TONIGHT ONLY!!!!!!!!
This is very important, WarGames, the most important geek film ever made, is in theaters TONIGHT at 7:30pm. ONE SHOWING ONLY. This film has been hugely influential for me, and many others. That awesome unbuttoned shirt over tshirt look that we emulate to this day, decades of trying to get text-to-voice to sound like the film (which was an actor reading the lines word by word in reverse), and who didn't fall in love with Ally Sheedy!...
DTrace IP Provider… Oh no you didn’t….
In my previous post about the IP Provider I got the following comment: "There is nothing unpleasant about the wonderfulness that is tcpdump! You’ll need to put a lot of work in to match tcpdump’s usefulness with Dtrace…" That just sounds like a challenge. Bring it on! Can snoop or tcpdump do this? root@ultra ~$ ./ip_whosent.d Packet sent to 192.168.100.4: 88 byte packet on behalf of ssh (PID: 1075) Packet sent to 192.168...
DTrace IP Provider
Recently introduced (snv_92) is the first piece of the DTrace Network Providers, the DTrace IP Provider. Here is a taste: root@ultra include$ dtrace -qn 'ip:ip:*:receive{ printf("Packet recieved from %s: %d byte packetn", args[2]->ip_saddr, args[4]->ipv4_length ); }' Packet recieved from 74.125.15.85: 40 byte packet Packet recieved from 74.125.15.85: 40 byte packet Packet recieved from 8.11.47.20: 88 byte packet Packet recieved from ...
Solaris IPsec: Shared Key Transport Mode
In this entry we'll build on our our IPsec Basics discussed last time and actually create an IPsec connection. IPsec can be used for direct system-to-system access known as "transport mode" or to create a virtual pipeline into which everything is encrypted, known as "tunnel mode". We're going to look at transport mode, which is an excellent solution for encrypting otherwise unencrypted protocols, such as SNMPv1/2 or telnet. When ...