Dan Frye: An Open Letter to IBM’s Gutless Coward
Hello Mr Dan Frye, My name is Ben Rockwood, I'm a member of the OpenSolaris community. Perhaps you've never heard of me because you've never actually looked at the OpenSolaris project, but thats understandable. Except, actually, it isn't. You've been saying some things lately that are, as my wife noted this evening: "blatantly ignorant". Indeed. You're making the same mistake that Mr. Martin Fink of HP made, shooting your big fat ...
LinuxWorld Quick Report
LinuxWorld SF 2006 is under way. I don't have time for a full report but thought I'd check in. The show is going pretty well so far. Two days down, one to go. In the booth I've got my home dev workstation on hand, and in an amazing stroke of luck my main man, ZFS co-inventor, Bill Moore, supplied me with a Thumper (X4500)! Additionally Alan DuBoff has been there in the afternoons showing off OpenSolaris on both his MacBook Pro (via ...
LinuxWorld SF 2006
LinuxWorld is happening this week! The expo won't open untill tomorow. OpenSolaris will be there! We're in the .Org pavilion, so come and see us! Come with your questions, your expectations, and the problems you need to solve and we'll show you want we have to offer, not just the software, but the thriving community around it all. While your there don't forget to visit our friends in the PostgreSQL .Org booth, X.org .Org booth, Greenplumb ...
PowerBook Power Adapter Woes
I found an article about PowerBook power adapter dangers this morning including a followup about the problematic design on slashdot. Personally, I'm amazed at the timing, because this very thing happened to Tamarah's PowerBook G4 on Friday! She had reported that her PowerBook stopped charging and she was almost out of battery. When I got home I looked at it and plugged it in myself and sure enough, it worked for me, but not for her. ...
ATA-Over-Ethernet for Solaris/SPARC
Coraid, creators of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), have released an AoE for Solaris/SPARC 7 or never. The driver is currently considered beta and the first release is v1.2. The binary driver and source are both available. The source is covered under its own license (no name) and is BSD-like in nature. Release notes are available and say the following with reguards to Solaris/X86 support: - There's no precompiled driver yet, nor have we ...
WTF Dept: Brocade Acquiring McData
Apparently I missed the news this week, On August 8, 2006 we announced Brocade's intention to acquire McDATA Corporation. Ummmmmmmm... what? Now, I can understand this from the perspective that Fibre Channel is a market thats past its peak. Business are supposed to grow year of year and thats becoming very hard, especially when they are competing against each other and Cisco is peaking in its head ruining all the fun. So, in some ...
ZFS and Thin Provisioning
ZFS is an amazing and wonderful technology. I say technology because its more than just any one of its capabilities. Being able to dish out, from a single pool, both filesystems and traditional volumes (which I'll call zvol's) makes for an extremely power storage foundation on which to build monumental structures without the traditional complexity that comes from such beloved products as my old friend Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM). In a ...
StorageTek… whatever… SUN MIDRANGE STORAGE 6000 RELEASE!
Released today and billed as the "New Generation of Modular Storage", Sun has given the world two new mid-range storage solutions complete with the beautiful Galaxy look. The StorageTek 6140 Array and StorageTek 6540. First things first, the StorageTek 6140 Array. Its a 16 disk 4Gb/s Fibre Channel array, features dual controllers and the ability to mix-and-match SATA and FC disks in a single enclosure. The brick comes in two configs, ...
LinuxWorld SF 2006: Next Week!
LinuxWorld is fast approaching. The show runs Mon-Thursday of next week, the expo floor is open Tues-Thursday. Want to go but can't flip the cash? Get your free expo pass now and be there! OpenSolaris will be at the show, yet again. But wait!!! Shhh, don't tell anyone, but Solaris is taking over LinuxWorld. Yup. No one there focuses on Linux anyway, so lets just pull out that carpet all the way. Check out the Solaris action at ...
Dive Gear Review: Hi Tech Makes for More Fun
I returned late Friday night from my week long annual family camping trip. For me, the high point of these trips is a chance to do some much needed diving... or, given that I don't take tanks, more specifically "snorkeling". Given time constraints, money constraints, etc, I'll take what I can. This year I finally refreshed my dive gear. When I moved into my current residence everything was present except for my old Tusa mask and snorkel. ...