Solaris
I'm happy to report I'm all lined up to be at LISA '09! I'm a LISA virgin, so I'm looking forward to seeing what all the buzz is about. I'll be presenting my ZFS in the Trenches talk, which is an advanced topics / internals discussion. I'm in the h4rdc0re 10-11pm slot, so bring a box of Twinkee's and pot of coffee with ya. A special thanks to Sun for making it possible for me to attend.
I want to give a shout-out to Peter Tribble and all the fantastic tools he's creating for the community. He's currently serving as an OpenSolaris Governing Board member and he's been a giant personality in the Solaris community for as long as I can remember, long before OpenSolaris was even a thought. By pairing his Java skills with his deep knowledge of Solaris he's given the world a number of excellent GUI applications to better underst...
Recently Solaris 10 10/09 (aka: Update 8) released. You can see the complete What's New in the Solaris 10 10/09 Release doc for details, but here is a brief overview. You can download the release from sun.com/solaris. Two-Terabyte Disk Support for Installing and Booting the Solaris OS pcitool Utility nss_ldap shadowAccount Support Sun Validation Test Suite 7.0 Patch Set 6 Turbo-Charging SVR4 Packaging (faster pkg installs) Zones ...
They don't mention X86... but they are sending the message they are serious about Solaris and the enterprise customer. There is hope. As I've said before, while I doubt I'll be happy about every decision Oracle makes regarding Solaris, it probly means good things for the platforms future by putting it (back) on a firm enterprise trajectory.
Just came across two books set for release later this year: and... You can find them listed on Amazon already. Should make a good addition to the existing Solaris series of books.
Some time ago I discussed The Joy of IPMI. IPMI is a handy want of interacting with the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) on enterprise class systems to retrieve information such as sensor data, event log, and even Serial over LAN (SoL, poor mans console). IPMI can also help you identify components in the system but isn't the best means of doing so. This is where SMBIOS comes in and can complete the picture. System Management BIOS ...
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is at it again. The publishing game isn't really about how good your writting is, just how many people read it. If you look at Steven's articles you'll notice they all have that ridiculous tabloid "the sky is falling!" flare to them. It gets readers, nothing more. And if you've come across todays FUD which just got posted to Slashdot, Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris?, I just want to help reassure ...
The Solaris Basic Audit & Reporting Tool, bart, is a great little alternative to Tripwire or AIDE. While not nearly so robust or full featured, it does what you need it to do with very little impact. The sqlite of intrusion detection systems, if you will. I blogged about BART in 2005 and so far its still only got 1 real comment, which was simply mentioning AIDE as an alternative. No love. Given that BART is awesome and no one seems to ...
In Part 1 we discussed core analysis in general and some basic mdb commands for high level investigation. When you dig deeper things can get confusing and complex because everything is referenced by address. This is where the Solaris Crash Analysis Tool comes in. Solaris CAT has been around for a long time, but only as of version 5.0 released on June 18th of this year has it been available for Solaris X86/X64. You can find the Solaris ...
Solaris is one of the most stable operating systems available... but lets face it, stuff happens. Solaris does panic, but I want everyone to be clear, a "panic", despite the seemingly contradictory name, is by its nature a controlled event. When the kernel encounters behavior that is uncorrectable and will cause irreparable harm to the running system or, even worse, corrupt data, the system will voluntarily tap out using the panic system ...