Planet OpenSolaris

opensolaris jobs!

2008-05-17T06:18:34+00:00

it’s nice to see the opensolaris-jobs list being used. jim put a link to all 3 jobs posted, hence my link to his blog post since i’m too lazy to copy and paste ‘em directly here.

what jim didn’t mention though is how kick ass the OpenSolaris Engineering team is. seriously, i encourage any qualified people to apply for those jobs. the team is fantastic, completely supportive, and is still to this date, the best team i’ve ever worked with. (at Songbird, i’m a team of one… and… well, let’s face it - i ain’t got nothing on the Tonic/OpenSolaris Engineering team).

… and to whomever is lucky enough to land the SysAdmin role… well… i’m sorry, you have my profoundest apologies for anything and everything i was responsible for. really, truly, sorry.

OpenSolaris Host - Virtual Box - Windows Guest

2008-05-17T04:17:38+00:00

Having seen a great demo and presentation this week about the new VirtualBox 1.6 release, I have been enjoying trying out the various combinations to see which ones I like more.

Today I tried out the Solaris version of VirtualBox on my OpenSolaris 2008.05 laptop.

My laptop is a Sony VAIO, a Centrino Pro processor based system. The first decision you need to make is whether you need to download the 32 bit or the 64 bit version. They recommend using the command isainfo -k in a terminal window to see which mode Solaris is running in. Solaris has a single distribution for both 32 bit and 64-bit capable CPUs, and at runtime, it picks the best mode. Since my system supports EM64T (extended memory 64 technology), OpenSolaris is running in 64 bit mode, so I downloaded that one.

After the download and untar, the instructions for installing the package are quite straightforward.

One small criticism is that you need to launch VirtualBox from the command line; it should install something in the Gnome desktop menus.

Once I launched VirtualBox, I was able to define a new Windows guest, give it around 1GB of memory (I am running with 2GB on the laptop), point the CD-ROM at the .iso file of Windows XP, and boot away. The install went flawlessly, and I was able to bring up Windows XP just fine. Also installing the Windows Guest extensions worked fine as well.

Networking and audio came through from Windows into Solaris, and since audio works in OpenSolaris, I was able to hear the Windows sounds just fine. Note that if you turn on seamless mode, you might not want to reboot your guest, as the display will be... um... interesting. Though this seems to happen with Windows as the host as well.

Of the two configurations I have tried (running OpenSolaris as a guest under Windows or running Windows as a guest under OpenSolaris), I actually think I prefer this one.

I could probably live my whole life in OpenSolaris and just use windows for those few times I just can't get away from it (like running my company expense reporting tool).
Compiz, the 3D graphical desktop under Gnome is a lot cooler than the effects on Windows.
I still need to figure out how to get my Windows guest to drill through the company firewall to set up a VPN connection, but I might have a website which explains how to do this.
My 3945 wireless connection on OpenSolaris doesn't seem to want to stay as stable as the Windows wireless networking. Perhaps need an upgrade to 4965!

OpenSolaris is Hiring

2008-05-17T02:09:43+00:00

Nice to see OpenSolaris engineering at Sun looking for more people:

best song i’ve heard this week

2008-05-16T18:17:07+00:00

YouTube video here: Lily Allen - Alfie

seriously had me cracking up when i heard this on 1.FM’s Trance stream just now.

Ooooo deary me,
My little brother’s in his bedroom smoking weed,
I tell him he should get up cause it’s nearly half past three.
He can’t be bothered ’cause he’s high on THC.
I ask him very nicely if he’d like a cup of tea,
I can’t even see him cause his room is so smokey,
Don’t understand how one can watch so much TV,
My baby brother Alfie how I wish that you could see.

The Re-org

2008-05-16T16:08:30+00:00

The OGB has started a discussion about a potential reorganization of the OpenSolaris community. This grew out of the re-org that started last year with the previous OGB and also discussions on various lists and at the OpenSolaris Summit in California last week. We talked about it earlier this week on our call, too.

I have a couple of interests here: First, I'm a member of the board and I want us to have a flexible community with a minimum of governance and process, and second, I very much want to complete the fixing of the user groups and this re-org will provide an opportunity to do that. With respect to the user groups, I moved all of them to projects when I merged the old User Group Community, the Marketing Community, and the Immigrants Community into the Advocacy Community Group (which was part of the first community re-org attempt last year). The good part of this is that the UGs are projects now and have their own spaces on the site. That was Stephen's idea. Love it. It took me three months, but it fixed the mess we created by stuffing individual UG pages inside one community until everything broke. But the UGs are still somewhat buried inside the Advocacy CG, and the vast majority of UG members are not at all involved in Advocacy and are not on advocacy-discuss. The user groups really need to be their own collective group with top level billing along side Projects, Community Groups, SIGs, Consolidations (or whatever mix of terms we come up with and hopefully a reduced mix).

I can't predict where any of this will go. Can you? It will be interesting, though, that's for sure.

uperf - benchmarking network

2008-05-16T14:32:24+00:00

"Heard of filebench? Want something similar for networking? Look no further! Today we opensourced uperf, a tool to benchmark networking performance. uperf, just like its cousin filebench,¹ is a framework that takes a description of a workload/application (called a profile), and generates load to match the profile. uperf is quite heavily used by the performance groups at Sun to study networking performance."

SAS vs. SATA

2008-05-16T12:49:05+00:00

I use Solaris zones a lot.

We've got a number of X2200s, in two variants. Some just run web front ends, and are fitted with SATA drives (once running, the only disk activity is the web server logs); the database back-ends have SAS drives.

OK, so the SAS drives are expected to be a bit quicker - we did get them for that purpose. Based solely on the rotational speed, there's about a factor of 2 difference in performance.

However, if you take zone creation time as a metric, the performance difference is rather larger than a factor of 4. Something else makes the SAS drives fly and the SATA drives crawl.

Google Translate Adds New Languages

2008-05-16T10:23:52+00:00

Google Translate adds 10 new languages, among them is Polish. Read more about it.

An upgrade too far

2008-05-16T09:33:08+00:00

I've been using Live Upgrade on my Solaris servers recently. Normally I would prefer a fresh install, as that gives you more of an opportunity to fix up any mistakes you made, but sometimes you need to preserve the application data or can't afford the downtime.

One word of warning, though: if you're starting with Solaris 8, you can go to Solaris 10 8/07 (update 4), but not to Solaris 10 5/08 (update 5). Even when upgrading from Solaris 9 or 10 you'll need the 7zip patches, but those don't exist (yet, anyway) for Solaris 8.

Fun with USB sticks - how to make one bootable with OpenSolaris 2008.05

2008-05-15T23:00:20+00:00

One of the nice things about OpenSolaris 2008.05 is that it is delivered as a bootable LiveCD. This means that you can try out the OS easily on your computer and see if it will work without risking the OS you are running on it now. Once you decide that all of the features and drivers work, it's a relatively easy task to do a complete install on your hard disk.

Since it's about 700MB, you can use a relatively cheap - almost free - 1GB USB stick or thumb drive to show somebody how wonderful OpenSolaris is.

I happened to come by a couple of USB sticks and decided to load up 2008.05 on them so they could be carried to a variety of machines and check out how 2008.05 works on them.

I had a little fun trying various tips from the web. Ashok sent me a link to James Liu's blog, and I tried this procedure. It seems to work, and I liked it because it unpacks the steps and let me see what is going on under the covers. One caveat with James' procedure: one of the steps that copies files onto the stick throws a few errors[1].

For a more automated method, try out this one from Dave Miner:

This works like a champ, though to be clear, there is one correction (which I found by reading the scripts):

# ./usbgen <path_to_iso_file> <path_to_usb_image> `pwd` <tmpdir>

This one seems to have gotten messed up in the HTML, or the usbgen script has changed. There are only 3 arguments to usbgen now. I would recommend specifying absolute pathnames for all three arguments, which you can do by prefacing the file names with the `pwd` method.

# ./usbcopy <path_to_usb_image>

Again, an absolute pathname works best here.

Anyway, this method seems to work well, and has very few manual steps. In fact, once you do the "usbgen" step, you can use usbcopy to create multiple sticks from that image. Nice!

The downside with this method is that you need to have the Mercurial tools installed (to do the "hg" command). Fortunately, I had a machine sitting around with all of this infrastructure set up and working. I suppose the other downside is that you need to run this from a Solaris or OpenSolaris machine, rather than from Windows.

Thanks Dave and James for writing this down. (And, since one of these USB sticks is going to my boss, I know he appreciates it too.)

[1] In the James Liu method, almost at the end, you run the following command:
# cp -rP@ .??* * /mnt/usbdrive

I got the following errors thrown from the cp command:
bin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory boot/solaris/bin/root_archive: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia0: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia1: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia2: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia3: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia4: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia5: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia6: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidia7: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/nvidiactl: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/stderr: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/stdin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory dev/stdout: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory

I'm not sure if these are fatal or not.

Unimaginable

2008-05-15T15:56:19+00:00

This is a difficult article to read. The photos are even more heartbreaking.

Community First

2008-05-15T15:47:36+00:00

Why Twitter Matters: "How could tiny Twitter ever become such a titan? It's not the core technology, which is simple, but instead the community." -- Stephen Baker, BusinessWeek

Lionel Lim, Sun Japan President

2008-05-15T12:18:44+00:00

Earlier today I had the opportunity to meet Lionel Lim, the new president of Sun Japan. I was impressed. His rhetoric was friendly, direct and honest, and he sounded like a guy looking to inspire people to get more innovative and take the opportunities out there. There is huge potential for Sun to gain more share of multiple markets in Japan. Also, as Sun grows in Japan by engaging more partners and customers, we can simultaneously engage more developers and users with more innovative community development operations. We are not doing nearly enough developer outreach in Japan, and I hope that changes because community development is quite literally market development. In fact, there is no distinction whatsoever, and Id argue this point with just about anyone. So, I´m looking forward to this new leadership. Should be fun. Sun Japan press release in Japanese.

Free Beer, CDs, and OpenSolaris 2008.05 in Tokyo

2008-05-15T09:41:15+00:00

Takanobu Masuzuki, developer marketing manager at Sun Japan, announced next week's launch details -- [osol-announce] Japan Launch event for OpenSolaris 2008.05. Space filling up fast.

links for 2008-05-15

2008-05-15T08:34:51+00:00

OpenSPARC T1 Version 1.6 Released

It's not mentioned often but OpenSPARC continues to be very active and is having a huge effect globally in how microelectronics is taught.

(tags: OpenSPARC SPARC OpenSource GPL Sun)
How to rescue Java from the men in suits

A press outing for Dalibor in his new role, and he's spot on with his comments.

(tags: JCP Java JavaOne2008 Dalibor Governance OpenSource FOSS)
OpenSolaris: What Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up

Whoa. High praise from Jason. I'd agree with most of what he says here, 2008.05 is an excellent start.

(tags: OpenSolaris Linux Solaris Ubuntu)

Campus Ambassador Map

2008-05-15T06:02:37+00:00

There is a new map of the Sun Campus Ambassadors on the Sun Developer Network site. There are over 500 of these guys, and the list promises to grow dramatically next year.

more home NAS and ZFS boot!

2008-05-14T23:42:47+00:00

Things have been crazy over the past few weeks. There have been so many wonderful things going on (like Community 1 and the OpenSolaris 2008.05 launch) and I've been so busy I have neglected my blog and audience.

Many of you took some time to watch the video of my experience building a home NAS box. If you are interested in such things I would highly recommend taking a look at Simon Breden's blog on his experience. Not only does he cover the configuration, but also the rational on why he chose his hardware and ZFS.

Speaking of ZFS, I would like to publicly congratulate the ZFS boot/ install team for their recent putback of the ZFS boot project. Lori, George, Eric, Mark, Lin, Eric and others put in well over 10,000 hours of effort (much of which was in the last 5 months) to make this project a reality. Back in build 88 the ZFS boot project was putback and this enable SPARC systems to use ZFS as the root file system. Then just this morning the install portion was putback into build 90. Again this putback enables systems to be installed with the legacy installer and use the features like LiveUpgrade and JumpStart for installation. The ZFS boot page has an FAQ and other useful documents on this project. Way to go team!!!

ZFS WriteThrottling

2008-05-15T00:14:40+00:00

ZFS had a problem with properly throttling intensive writers like a simple dd if=/dev/null of=/zfs/file which would usually produce "jumpy" writes instead os steady write stream. There is a new way of throttling in ZFS which should solve the problem - I have not tested it yet. The new code was integrated into build 87. Roch has posted a good explanation of the old and the new behavior.

PowerTop for OpenSolaris v1.0

2008-05-14T22:24:19+00:00

The first release of the PowerTop tool for OpenSolaris is available at the Tesla Project's page (http://opensolaris.org/os/project/tesla/).

PowerTop is an observability tool that shows how effectively the system is taking advantage of the CPU's power management features. The tool allows the user to see how long the CPU is running at different power states, and which events are causing the system to wakeup and consequently consume more energy.

In order to run PowerTop, the user must have Solaris Nevada build 82 or higher installed.
It will also be possible to run the tool on Solaris 10 systems with Update 6 - once such update is released.

x86 and SPARC packages are available. We're also working on getting it into pkg.opensolaris.org so everyone can take advantage of the new kickass IPS packaging system on OpenSolaris 2008.05 :)

PowerTop is a community project developed on opensolaris.org. Join our alias (tesla-dev@opensolaris.org) if you're interested in getting involved.

VirtualBox v1.6 - Open Source desktop virtualization

2008-05-14T22:12:33+00:00

VirtualBox is a great desktop virtualization solution. It's free for personal use / evaluation, runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Solaris or OpenSolaris, and supports a huge number of guest OS's. The user interface is really well tuned for a simple desktop user, and as UI's go, I think it has some really good context-aware help.

I was running VirtualBox 1.5 for some months, and it is a great way for me to run OpenSolaris on my Windows laptop(or run Windows on my OpenSolaris desktop for that matter). Great functionality and performance.

They just recently released VirtualBox 1.6, and they added the "Guest Additions" feature support for Solaris and OpenSolaris. This means I can do things like Windows integration, which allows me to view guest windows in the host OS. (ie, an OpenSolaris window just looks and acts like a Windows window). This is really cool beans, and it installs great and works great!

The only missing feature in the Solaris Guest Additions is the Shared Folders between OpenSolaris and Windows. This is supposed to be fixed in the next release, which I think is in about a quarter.

The one criticism I have about Guest Additions: to install these in the guest required a bunch of searching around on my part before I finally located it. (It turns out that when you install VirtualBox, the guest additions .iso file is present along with the VirtualBox .exe, which in Windows is in Program Files.) Just read the user manual, it has the goods there, but was just hard for me to find with a quick scan, it took some effort to find it.

In some competing proprietary VM software, adding the guest additions is quite simple, I think you just click a button. And if you don't have the guest additions installed, you get a little nag on your screen when you start up guests which have not been so enhanced. This would be a good improvement for VirtualBox.

Good job Innotek!! I like these bits.

Impressive Install

2008-05-14T08:56:58+00:00

First look: OpenSolaris 2008.05 a work in progress: "The most impressive aspect of OpenSolaris is the installation experience, which is painless, intuitive, and easily on par with Ubuntu and Fedora." -- Ryan Paul, Ars Technica

I agree. And this is a big deal for regular people like me (non-engineering types, I mean). When I started on the OpenSolaris project four years ago, I could not install the pre-Solaris 10 builds, and I struggled with subsequent versions of Solaris Express. I always had to get help. Solaris was always for pretty high end people, but that's all changed now. Actually, the install has been pretty easy for about a year now, but with OpenSolaris 2008.05 so many other things just work. Beautiful.

links for 2008-05-14

2008-05-14T08:33:51+00:00

Little Brother: Cory Doctorow

Cory's new book has hit Amazon UK. Time to grab a copy.

(tags: Amazon Books Cory)
Amazon.co.uk: In Person: 30 Poets Filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce

I've previously found that hearing poems read by their author adds a new dimension to their meaning. Hearing TS Eliot read The Waste and was transformative. So I'm looking forward to this arriving.

(tags: Amazon Poetry Books)
Why Product Management is Open Source's Fatal Flaw

While I think this correctly diagnoses the problem I think the solution is to be found elsewhere than trying to make a developer community hire a PHB.

(tags: OpenSource Pidgin Business management)
OpenJDK in Fedora 9

Truly excellent. The lesson to be learned is that the best way to get Java everywhere was to work with the community rather than expect the community to work with Sun. Let's hope that lesson sticks and spreads.

(tags: OpenJDK Java Fedora OpenSource Community)

AMD Road Map

2008-05-14T08:12:00+00:00

AMD released their new roadmap today. Several references to the Barcelona delays (AMD Quad Core, delays which have impacted Sun's release schedule) are scattered throughout and positioned as a major setback for AMD to overcome in the next several years. Whether you follow the news or not its obvious to anyone in or around IT that AMD has given up a tremendous lead over Intel in the last 2 years and Intel is continuing to pummel 'em. Lets hope that AMD can really pull it together and stay in the game.

A "well, duh!" moment

2008-05-14T03:57:26+00:00

I run two non-global zones on my workstation - one for web/dns/blog, and one for my VPN connection to Sun. Yesterday realised that there was an internal webcast I really needed to listen, so I started playing around with audio in the zone. First off, there wasn't any audio output. No /dev/audio* or /dev/sound/*.

After a bit of searching, I found that I should add a "set match" option to my zonecfg:

# zoneadm -z knockout
zonecfg:knockout> add device
zonecfg:knockout:device> set match=/dev/sound/*
zonecfg:knockout:device> end
zonecfg:knockout> commit
zonecfg:knockout> exit
# zoneadm -z knockout boot

But that didn't work. I was rather annoyed at that point, so I logged 6701076 zones should not be sound proof!. Perhaps I was a bit hasty - the RE updated the bug overnight (my time) asking "Why didn't you do the obvious thing and add a 'set match=/dev/audio*' ?"

Which was the "well, duh!" moment for me. Boy do I feel like a nong:

# zoneadm -z knockout halt
# zoneadm -z knockout
# zonecfg -z knockout
zonecfg:knockout> add device
zonecfg:knockout:device> set match=/dev/audio*
zonecfg:knockout:device> end
zonecfg:knockout> commit
zonecfg:knockout> exit
# zoneadm -z knockout boot

/me looks around sheepishly.... it works

night moves

2008-05-14T03:05:22+00:00

The last night flying I did was quite a while ago. On that trip, I got just two take-offs and landings to a full stop. So, per the regulations, I needed another 8 in my log book.

I scheduled time with Tim tonight in 61976 (my usual plane), starting at 8:30PM, and I got to the airport at about 8:20. Civil Twilight today started at 8:31. If I'd been thinking about it, I probably would have scheduled for 8PM. It always takes at least a half hour more than I expect to do the pre-flight, run through the checklist, get clearance, do the run-up, and get ready to roll. By the time we headed out of runway 5, it was almost 9PM, and the tower was closing down the pattern.

So, we headed off to Beverly. I flubbed the navigation a bit -- the top VOR with the integrated controls sometimes doesn't like me -- but with the airport only 13 miles away, it was easy enough to find the beacon visually. I made a straight-in approach to runway 16, then taxied back to go up again.

It was a nice, cool, clear, and calm night. We had had strong gusting winds all day, but they were predicting that they'd die down by evening, and they were quite right. At least I didn't have to correct for wind too much in an unfamiliar pattern at night -- with the PCL timer cutting out on me every now and then just to make things interesting.

We went around the pattern five times, taxing out to the other end each time to take off in the other direction; a luxury afforded by the lack of wind, and probably a good thing for the neighbors. On the last landing, he had me land with lights out to simulate an alternator failure. It's hard to judge the ground like that, and I came down a bit firmly.

We headed back to Lawrence about two minutes to 10. They close the tower at 10, so we came in doing position calls. I picked runway 32 (approximately straight in) for my first approach. My reasoning was that I could *see* the runway in front of me, and I was already low enough to make a good flaps-and-lights-out approach. Tim pointed out that it was the short and narrow runway, and that I should have gone in the pattern. I came in, made a sloppy sort of slip, and landed hard again.

We taxied out to the far end and turned around to take off on 14. I went up and turned left into the downwind for 23. I made my position calls, then turned base. I was a touch high, and Tim said to slip it. I eased into the best slip I've ever done. The nose pivoted to the right, I stayed right on the track I wanted, and I got at least 1200 fpm descent, right to the runway. I let out the slip, flared, and landed firmly (again without lights), but pretty much where I wanted.

I taxied off at Alpha near the approach end of 5, after taxing the long way down the runway. Tim said I did the best I've done so far, and I told him about Sean's advice regarding trim.

That's it; my full 10 landings are done. On to the next item to check off.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 to Launch in Japan

2008-05-14T00:36:23+00:00

The OpenSolaris community in Japan will hold a launch event for OpenSolaris 2008.05 here in Tokyo on Friday May 23rd -- OpenSolaris 2008.05 リリース記念セミナー. The event will be led by Sun's Globalization engineers, Ohsone-san and Hasegawa-san, as well as Ohta-san and Sato-san from OpenNSUG/OSUG.

Helping Out

2008-05-14T00:33:18+00:00

It's great to see the Sun community offering resources to help the people affected by the natural disasters in Myanmar and China. Sun's relief drive is year round, of course, but there are two immediate needs. Those who are far away watching these horrible events unfold need not feel helpless. Financial contributions are the best way help to get food, medicine, and supplies into the hands of rescue workers. Also, as employees contribute, the Sun Microsystems Foundation has a matching funds program. All the best to everyone out there. And remember, these things can happen to anyone, anywhere, any time.

Sun does quad core Opterons

2008-05-13T20:07:42+00:00

So Sun are now - finally - pushing quad core Opterons in the X4140, X4240, and X4440.

The X4240 is a new one. I like it. Yes, whereas I complained before, this one does have 16 internal drives.

Mail droppage

2008-05-13T18:57:05+00:00

It looks like I missed making a configuration change last update, and opensolaris.org has been dropping my mail messages for the past week as a result. Sorry—if you're waiting for mail from me, you may need to ping me again. Otherwise, I'll try to reinsert myself in various threads...

awesome animation vid

2008-05-13T18:41:32+00:00

thanks to pvh (fellow birder) for sending me this video… an animation all done via wall painting

it’s unbelievably awesome