OpenSolaris


Yes! You too can behold the end of Sun Microsystems! On Thursday, July 16th, at 10AM a special shareholders meeting will take place at the Santa Clara campus. If you are a shareholder, come and wear black, as our beloved company officially ceases to exist. All kidding aside, the meeting is a formality as everyone should have already voted via proxy (I did a couple weeks ago), but this is the moment in which the fate is set in stone. ...

Read More


Kernel Conference Australia starts today. A 3 day event that should be amazing. Sun, thankfully, realizes all of us can't go, so there is a live stream so you can enjoy it from the comfort of your native country. Things start today at 4PM Pacific time. Highlights on the agenda include: "Deduplication in ZFS" by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore "Nehalem and OpenSolaris: more than the sum of their parts" by Max Alt "Diagnosing Intere...

Read More


Crashing Solaris for Fun and Profit

Posted on June 9, 2009

Crashing is the wrong title actually. We're talking about panics. Its sort of like saying "hacking" when you mean "cracking". A "crash" is when an OS preforms some operation that typically causes the system to reboot. Solaris is very unique from rival Linux in that 99% of the time such an event will be caught by the OS and handled as a "panic" instead of an uncontrolled crash. While its not a sexy feature of Solaris, panics are ...

Read More


CommunityOne/JavaOne Wrapup

Posted on June 4, 2009

CommunityOne is done, and JavaOne is passing by. As usual a great show. There is no way to even compare other events with that of JavaOne and associated events. The energy was high this year, although under a big "what is Oracle going to do??" cloud of fear. From a OpenSolaris perspective there were a great number of fantastic talks. Of special interest was emerging technologies that have tremendous disruptive potential, such as ...

Read More


CommunityOne Domination

Posted on May 29, 2009

I'm up to 3 sessions! Come say "hi" at CommunityOne West... I'll be: Presenting a 50 minute ZFS talk on Monday June 1st, focusing on features and application. Presenting a 20 minute Use Case for Crossbow at the Crossbow BOF Monday evening. Presenting a 2 hour zero-to-hero Becoming a ZFS Ninja "deep dive" on Tuesday. Lots of quality goodies at the show. If you have any suggestions for storage topics I should cover in my 50 minute ...

Read More


JavaOne is coming up, the first week of June, and that means CommunityOne is back! There is a whole week of goodness, starting with the HA Cluster Summit Sunday May 31st, then CommunityOne June 1st thru the 3rd, and JavaOne the rest of the week. On June 2nd, I'll be giving a 2 hour zero-to-hero talk on ZFS to give you Ninja like skills. Here is a brief outline of the talk: Creating Pools & Layout Schemes (RAID) Pool Maintena...

Read More


ONStor Pantera LS 2100: ZFS in a Can

Posted on May 6, 2009

Here's something in the "old news I didn't catch" dept... ONStor Pantera LS 2100 "a breakthough storage platform that delivers enterprise class features at entry level prices." Why do we care? Its ZFS based. Joining similar storage solutions NexentaStor and almighty Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (aka Amber Road + FishWorks). ONStor is offering two configs: The LS 2130: 4 Intel Cores, 8GB of RAM, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ...

Read More


OpenSolaris vs Nexenta: Distro Wars

Posted on April 12, 2009

OpenSolaris is drawing close to its 3rd distribution release. Nexenta is closed to releasing NCP 2. It's nearing the time to decide. Here are some of my thoughts in an attempt to stimulate the conversation after recently spending some time with both. Nexenta really is impressive. NCP is true to its name, its a core and nothing more. Despite that, if you're not a Windows...erm, I mean, GNOME, fan this simply means there is less crap ...

Read More


Solaris Loopback Crypto & Compression

Posted on April 1, 2009

Linux has always been in love with its loopback trickery for implementing compression and cryptography but a cry has gone out for similar capabilities in Solaris and those requests have been answered. The Solaris Loopback File driver (aka: LOFI) has supported compression for some time now, and as of snv_105 encryption has been added as well. LOFI Basics If your unfamiliar with LOFI, lets catch you up. LOFI is used for accessing a file ...

Read More


OpenSolaris Election Results

Posted on March 24, 2009

It is done, the results are available: see the official results here. The Constitution did not pass... it was getting lots of votes as expected, however due to our massive number of non-active "members", we didn't get a majority. 218 Ayes, 31 Nays, and 22 Abstaining. A majority was required, which as 234 Ayes to pass. The good new is that the Nays and Abstentions really did matter, so this was community decided, not simply a result of ...

Read More