Solaris
Spencer Shepler is leaving Sun. I am saddened to see him go. If you don't know Spencer's name, he's been an NFS giant for a long time and we all owe a debt of gratitude to him. Of his long list of accomplishments he is a a chair of the IETF NFSv4 Working Group and is the most prominent name on the NFSv4 RFC 3530. Make sure to keep your eyes on his new blog.
Peter Tribble is one of the most legendary of Solaris administrators, if you're a Solaris SA and you don't know Peter's name your just not paying attention. One of the reasons that Peter is such an amazing guy, besides his british wit, is how he uses Java like a chissle to naturally get things done. He's written a wide variety of excellent tools and he's just updated one of my favorite: jKstat. Digging through Solaris kstats can be ...
In case you haven't heard the news, there has been a little shift in the Solaris Express program. For some time now we've had 2 version of express: Solaris Express (SX) and Solaris Express: Community Release (SX:CR). The products have re-organized slightly and we now have: Solaris Express Developer Edition ('SXDE") and Solaris Express Community Edition ("SXCE"). The difference being that DE is on a 3-4 month release cycle based on Nevada ...
Every so often you learn something that your surprised you didn't already know. My ego says to hide that fact but my pragmatic side says I should help make sure others aren't naive as well. In this case I refer to Solaris password security and namely the default crypt_unix(5) algorithm. If you look at /etc/shadow on a Solaris system by default you'll see lines like this: cacti:mxqZuc0PXJ/gw:13453:::::: In this line "mxqZuc0P...
Solaris 10 just gets more powerful all the time. Today Solaris 10 Update 3 (11/06) has been released. This brings a large number of features that have been in OpenSolaris for some time into the fully supported release. They include: SNIA Multipath Management API Support fsstat File-System Monitoring Tool (Very handy indeed!) ZFS Command Improvements and Changes, including RAIDZ-2, Hot-Spares, Recursive Snapshots, Promotion of Clones, ...
The Solaris 10 Update 3 beta is opening up this week. Notices for the program went out last week and applications are being reviewed now. By the end of the week it is expected that people will start installing and testing it. The current release is labeled "Solaris 10 (11/06)" so we're hoping for a November release. There was a lot of work poured into B49 of Nevada which just closed a week ago, and perhaps this is why. The current slated ...
Access Control Lists, or ACL's, can also often abbreviated as PITA (if you don't know what that means, ask your local SA). I've largely ignored ACL's becaue they aren't used very often, around me anyway, and I just feel that they are often a big pain. Thankfully someone realizes my pain and things are getting much better thanks to NFSv4 ACL's and ZFS. So lets take a couple minutes to talk about ACL's, why they are a neccsiary evil, and ...
Coraid, creators of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), have released an AoE for Solaris/SPARC 7 or never. The driver is currently considered beta and the first release is v1.2. The binary driver and source are both available. The source is covered under its own license (no name) and is BSD-like in nature. Release notes are available and say the following with reguards to Solaris/X86 support: - There's no precompiled driver yet, nor have we ...
Finally finally, the second edition of Solaris Internals has shipped. Last night at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group we had a presentation on Xen by Sun Fellow Tim Marsland which ruled. And as a very very special treat prior to the meeting Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro, Sun performance gods, talked about the new book and the long journey to writting it. Interesting tidbit... the girl with her hand in the Niagara is ...
Solaris 10 Update 2 is officially ready for download. Currently bandwidth is being strained at Sun due to massive interest in the release. For the scoop on whats new and exciting, What's New in the Solaris 10 6/06 Release doc. Some high points include: The Solaris ZFS File System Predictive Self-Healing for x64 Systems Predictive Self-Healing Support for SNMP Notification Common Agent Container (for JMX and JDMK iSCSI ...