OpenSolaris


Solaris on Dell PowerEdge x950 III

Posted on June 6, 2008

Solaris has recently hit a milestone in my mind, at least if your a Dell PowerEdge fan. As of Build 88 (I recommend snv_89 or newer) Solaris runs like a dream on Dell PowerEdge servers such as the recently released 2950 III which offers Dell PERC6/i (LSI MegaSAS), the latest Intel Quad-Core CPU's and has greatly reduce power consumption over the Dell 2950 II. Prior to Build 88 Solaris didn't have support for the MegaSAS controller, thus ...

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Solaris ACL’s Today

Posted on June 5, 2008

Quite some time ago I wrote about ACL's in my blog entry ACL!...Bless You. A funny title and play on the pronunciation of the acronym Access Control List ("Ackel"), but not readily found via Google. Sadly, if you are running Solaris 10 with ZFS or better yet a Nevada or OpenSolaris build you are going to get confused if you do a search and get ancient articles telling you to use getfacl and setfacl. These tools are used for viewing or ...

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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 ...

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/root: Ya… that happened.

Posted on April 30, 2008

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 ...

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SMF Manifest Generator

Posted on April 29, 2008

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 ...

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I solved a problem today that I think others might find interesting and helpful, both in process and solution. I've posted it in the Joyent company blog: Joyeur: DTrace, MySQL, Ganglia, and Digging for Solutions. Check it out.

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Every time a new application integrates static DTrace probes there is much rejoicing... and I'm glad for that, but I'm afraid a lot of people think that DTrace isn't useful in userland without probes being baked into the code. This couldn't be further from the truth, in fact, putting static probes in your code is, 90% of the time, just a convenience. If you don't believe me, try this script on any application you like: #!/usr/sb...

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This is a call for all Solaris Evangelists in the SF Bay Area... LUGradio SF is happening this weekend at the Metreon. Sun/OpenSolaris will have a booth there, put together by the amazing Jesse Silver. I had planned to help man the booth on Saturday but other plans came up and I am forced to withdraw. If your an evangelist who wants to meet kool people and share the news about OpenSolaris I'd encourage you to go to the OpenSolaris Advocacy ...

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Songbird on Solaris!

Posted on April 7, 2008

Who's the man? Alfred Peng's the man. He has released a Solaris/X86 binary build of Songbird 0.5! I downloaded it to my snv_85 box (BFU'ed from snv_75 install), untar'ed and started up absolutely fine and is very quick. I'm currently listening to my NIN Ghosts I-IV FLAC's. I'll be honest with you.. I installed Songbird on my Mac simply for listening to FLAC's... but its really really hard to compete with iTunes, not just because ...

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You probly heard a couple weeks ago that Sun has initiated a new OpenSolaris Project to integrate Flexible Mandatory Access Control (FMAC) into *Solaris which is being jointly developed by the NSA. John Weeks from Sun gave a talk last month at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group and video is now available on the SVOSUG Home Page. If your thinking RBAC, don't... think Trusted Solaris instead and your on a closer track. This will ...

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