OpenSolaris


Sun continues its crusade to kill itself….

Posted on November 30, 2007

You need to read this: An Open Letter to the OpenDS Community and to Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice has been ripped apart, now OpenDS, who knows what else is happening in other open source projects that Sun's involved in. This kills me. I love Sun Microsystems and I'm just sitting here watching it rip itself apart piece by piece. Who is in control? Why has Sun continued to RIF many of its most valuable employees without having a clue. ...

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Sun, the Community, and the OGB

Posted on November 2, 2007

We're at a cross roads, a conflict that has been lingering and postponed for some time now that Indiana is bringing to the surface with new viger. So lets get some basic ground rules understood please... "Sun" refers to the corporate, nameless entity. The big black box when no attribution is available. I keep hearing "Sun did this..", "Sun did that..". This has got to stop. We know the players involved. They, despite having a Sun ...

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Praise for Opera

Posted on November 2, 2007

The Opera web browser has been around a long time and its always been a bit player with a hardcore following. I've always thought of it as the BeOS of browsers. But are you using it? To be perfect honest I think that Opera is (now) probly the best browser available. Even more so, its integrated mail client is I think the best mail client available. If Opera had any one fault it would be that it does too much, because at its heart its ...

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Nexenta’s Storage Appliance: NexentaStor

Posted on November 2, 2007

I want to wish a hearty congratulations to our friends at Nexenta for introducing NexentaStor, the first available "OpenSolaris" (meaning Nevada, not Indiana) based storage appliance! From the beginning, Alex Ross and the Nexenta crew have had in mind to build a business around OpenSolaris (meaning the code, not Indiana) and to leverage technology for its own ends. This was something those of us involved with OpenSolaris (meaning the ...

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Thinking ZFS: Keys for success

Posted on November 2, 2007

There are a lot of core concepts to grasp with ZFS. Frankly, power comes at the price of a learning curve. While ZFS makes storage simpler than ever, a solid grasp of the core concepts is really critical to efficient usage. Anytime someone says "multiple filesystems" I cringe. There is no faster way to lead yourself down a confused road than to think of the zfs create command as creating a new filesystem. You're creating a new ...

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Compressed Secure ZFS Archives

Posted on October 27, 2007

ZFS is an amazing technology. Its snapshot capability quickly changes the way you work on the desktop or server. Add replication via zfs send .. and zfs recv .. and life gets even better. Jeff, Bill, and crew, geniuses that they are, did something very special and exceptionally powerful that you might be overlooking... ZFS replication is just a simple stream. Simply brilliant that is, because that means you can dump a ZFS Snapshot into ...

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Userland Cryptography on OpenSolaris

Posted on October 27, 2007

OpenSSL is the old standby solution for all things encryption, but did you know that Solaris provides an excellent array of userland tools to solve your cryptographic cypherpunk needs? There are 3 we'll look at which provide the most basic cryptographic needs: encrypt & decrypt: This pair of tools encrypt and decrypt a stream or file mac: Calculate cryptographic Message Authentication Codes (MACs) for a stream or file digest: ...

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ZFS RW on Leopard

Posted on October 27, 2007

b00 y44. Login in to the ADC (free membership available), download the ZFS Beta1 seed, install on to your new Leopard install, and reboot... 2 minutes total and you get what you desire: Macintosh:~ tamr$ sudo zpool Password: missing command usage: zpool command args ... where 'command' is one of the following: create [-fn] [-R root] [-m mountpoint] ... destroy [-f] add [-fn] ... remove list [-H] [-o field[,...

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NFSv4 and ZFS on OS X Leopard

Posted on October 27, 2007

NFSv4 is in. iSCSI is not (by default, still looking through options). ZFS is in!!! Macintosh:~ tamr$ sudo zpool Password: ZFS Readonly implemntation is loaded! To download the full ZFS read/write kext with all functionality enabled, please go to http://developer.apple.com Read-Only ZFS Implementation missing command usage: zpool command args ... where 'command' is one of the following: list [-H] [-o field[,field]*] [pool] ...

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At long last, snv_75a Express ISO's are available. This is a big release because it integrates xVM (Xen) support. Download it now! The full Changelog is here and the source is here. Should be a fun night of hacking!

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