Sun’s Next Branding Blunder: xVM
I really hate bashing Sun, but I've gotta speak out against Sun's continued moronic branding. Following in the tradition of "N1", "Java Enterprise System", and the horrible replacement of the good brand StorEdge with the misused StorageTek brand (applied to everything from long time Sun Arrays to Adaptec controllers), comes xVM. Lets look at the definition of "brand": 4 a: a class of goods identified by name as the product of a ...
X4150 Frustrations
I thought this was funny... taken from the latest Driver/BIOS CD: Sun Fire X4150 Remote Firmware Update procedures ======================================================================= NOTE: To update the BIOS and SP for the Sun Fire X4150, the onboard CPLD *MUST* be updated first. This necessary update adds required functionality to allow the BIOS fo function with the new range of Intel Processors. Proce...
General Update
I've been slacking on my blogging duties... with the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05, the OpenSolaris Developers Summit, and CommunityOne I should be blogging more than ever, but life has taken presidency for a short while. I do intend to catch up, but I'll start with a general update. Things progress very well at Joyent. Cloud Computing is the new big thing and we're right there in the pioneering pack, which is exciting. Its a lot of ...
AMD Road Map
AMD released their new roadmap today. Several references to the Barcelona delays (AMD Quad Core, delays which have impacted Sun's release schedule) are scattered throughout and positioned as a major setback for AMD to overcome in the next several years. Whether you follow the news or not its obvious to anyone in or around IT that AMD has given up a tremendous lead over Intel in the last 2 years and Intel is continuing to pummel 'em. Lets ...
The OpenSolaris Community v2: Prepare Yourself
Ian Murdock's distro formly known as "Indiana" will be birthed as "OpenSolaris" in less than a week, being debuted at CommunityOne on May 5th. This will be a major landmark even in the history of Solaris, right up there with the BSD-to-SysV transition and release of the code. There is no talk at Sun regarding Solaris 11, when pushed the only quote I get is "over my dead body", apparently coming from high within the organization. While no ...
/root: Ya… that happened.
A frequent point of contention among sysadmins, the presence of a /root home directory for the root user is now settled by PSARC/2003/039 Alternate home directory for root user integrated into snv_87. Here is the new default passwd file, get used to it: 1 root:x:0:0:Super-User:/root:/sbin/sh 2 daemon:x:1:1::/: 3 bin:x:2:2::/usr/bin: 4 sys:x:3:3::/: 5 adm:x:4:4:Admin:/var/adm: 6 lp:x:71:8:Line ...
You & Your Hard Drive in the 21st Century
If 10 years ago someone said "One day your wife will carry an extra hard drive in her purse", I'd have rolled my eyes. On a recent trip to pick up a hard drive (to replace the piece of crap that died in my MacBook Pro; so far every Apple laptop we've owned has had an OEM drive die) I saw, to my amazement, this: CaseLogic, the folks that made those CD cases we all used to have in our cars, is now making neoprene sleeves for 2.5" hard ...
SMF Manifest Generator
Announced today on the OpenSolaris Announce list was this snazzy tool: easySMF. Its a simple to use web form that creates SMF Manifests that you can easily plug into your system (svccfg import my_manifest.xml). This is snazzy indeed and I'm very curious to know who wrote it, but its hosted by the OpenSolaris Hispano Project, nice work guys! SMF Manifests are like Atari games, takes a couple tries to get the hang of things but you'll ...
Jonathan Schwartz Keynote at MySQL Users Conf 2008
Last week amongst the fun at the MySQL Users Conference I woke up early enough one day to watch the keynote at which Jonathan Schwartz presented a 30 minute talk about the aquisition, Open Source software in general, and Sun's principles. I highly recommend watching this keynotes replay and I kindly ask that you resist the urge to flip through it, but rather get a cup of coffee (I need Illy as a sponsor) and set aside 30 minutes to watch it ...
Whats up with Sun PR?
I hate to be critical, but some times something has to be said so folks know we're paying attention. New systems are available from Sun, the Sunfire X4140 and X4440... behold: These systems are AMD Dual Core and presumably NVIDIA chipsets (an earlier comment by a read states its 4 GE ports are NGE). There is no press release that I can find! Joerg Moellenkamp blogs about it here, and the Sun "On the Record" blog mentioned it as ...