Solaris
If you've never heard of iPXE, it is the official fork of gPXE, which was the ultimate result of the Etherboot Project of old. Apparently there was a power struggle that caused the primary contributors to leave Etherboot/gPXE and they renamed gPXE to iPXE to distinguish. Technically gPXE still exists, but for all intents and purposes its a dead project. If you are completely unfamiliar with both iPXE and gPXE let me summarize. The ...
In a previous entry I described Graphite and gave an overly simplistic example of integrating it with DTrace... lets get a little more serious and see what fun we can have. For a years a problem nagged at me. I wanted to get really fine grained latency information from an NFS server to track user experience. This isn't an easy thing to do, especially for hundreds of exports. First off, you have to use DTrace to get that kind of data, ...
Sorry for the late notice, but all you folks out here in the Bay Area for OracleWorld won't want to miss out on a very exciting event tomorrow night: What? Solaris Family Reuinion Where? Joyent HQ, 345 California St, 20th Floor When? Tuesday Oct 4th, 6PM till 10PM (and maybe a pub after that!) Why? Beer! Food! Community! Register here: http://smartos-estw.eventbrite.com We've all gone off in different directions, but this will be ...
If you haven't heard of Graphite you are missing out on a serious operations power tool. Let me make a gross over simplification and slightly inaccurate assertion to get you in the ballpark of understanding what it is: it's RRDtool reimplemented for the web. Let me be more specific for those new to it. Graphite is really made up of 3 components. The first is "Carbon" which is a metrics collection daemon that collects data via a UDP ...
Smart Cards, OTP, Hardware Tokens like SecurID... 2 factor auth is an old standby and considered mandatory for any high security installation. But lets face facts, there are a myriad of problems involved. SecurID is complex and expensive and now has destroyed its credibility following the Lockheed break-in. Smart Cards are really sweet, especially solutions from ActivIdentity, but again its expensive and you have client hardware requirem...
Hadoop HDFS has essentially become the de facto standard in cluster file systems. I'm theory I'm a big fan of Lustre; I say "theory" because it never got ported to Solaris, despite the fact that Sun bought Lustre. But thats a different story. HDFS is extremely portable and well supported by a thriving community who are doing anything you can image with it. Consider a large cluster of production nodes. They almost certainly have unused ...
This is a real thing. This is not hype or idle rambling. OpenSolaris is, as of Friday the 13th of August, 2010, dead. Read the full skinny in the leaked internal email to Solaris Engineering. Here is the short version: OpenSolaris is dead. No more real-time/nightly code pushes. OpenSolaris 2010.05 will not happen, nor will any in the future. Solaris 11 Express will be the new "developer" release which will be available through OTN. ...
A reader wrote today wondering why my entries have slowed down and there isn't a lot of news coming. Quite simply there isn't much to say. I've felt a need to return to blogging various smaller technical posts just to keep the blog on life support until something happens at Oracle. Larry ranted about Sun's problems to Reuters recently. Perhaps the only surprise was this: "More infuriating, says Ellison, is that Sun routinely sold ...
Dear Oracle, Congratulations on the EU approval of your acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Many of us in the various Sun communities spent years working closely with Oracle products on Sun technology and feel right at home being part to the Oracle family. The business savvy and dedication to customer success will be a welcome change in the direction of all of Sun's technologies. While the strategy webcasts and FAQs have been ...
Here's something in the category of "things that makes you go wha?!?": The OpenSolaris Security Summit has been renamed to simply "Solaris" Security Summit. If we've been looking for the first shot fired at OpenSolaris this would seem to be it. The question is whats next? When you combine this with the recent resurrection of "Solaris Next" (aka: Solaris 10++) it starts suggesting something is in the works, undoubtedly Oracle orchestra...