February 08, 2010

Simon Phipps☞ Community Matters

February 08, 2010 01:20 PM GMT

Jim GrisanzioOpenSolaris: My Original Pre Launch Email in 2005

February 08, 2010 06:45 AM GMT

Earlier today I was thinking about the original "good luck" email I sent to the OpenSolaris Pilot Community just before we opened the project in June of 2005. Fortunately, the opensolaris-discuss public archive actually goes back 9 months before we launched, so this mail survives in the open and from the other threads you get a glimpse into some of the very earliest conversations taking place when the project was private. Anyway, what strikes me is how different the situation was back then, how utterly conservative we were, and how my thinking has changed as a result of my experiences all along the way. A day after I sent this email, we opened. See my opening blog here, and the result of that opening announcement here. History. Always enlightening.

[osol-discuss] Good Luck and Thank You

Jim Grisanzio Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM
Mon Jun 13 17:27:01 PDT 2005

Hello, OpenSource Pilot Community.

I just wanted to chime in before the fur really flies around here:

 Good Luck, and Thank You!

You all deserve Sun's thanks for your efforts and your patience this 
year. It should be wild day tomorrow, for sure, so light up those blogs 
and start talking, guys. The engineers are leading this launch tomorrow, 
make no mistake about it.

Oh, and if you want to bring someone into the program, you *don't* have 
to call me and sign another f****** NDA. Just do it. I can't tell you 
how happy I am to not have to dig out another NDA. Not that I could read 
the damn thing but whatever. It's such a cold way to start a friendly 
little conversation, don't you think? Also, I've tried to honor as many 
of your requests (and those from internal people) as possible to get 
people into the program. We ended up with 145, but quite frankly, dozens 
and dozens of developers never made it in due to lack of time or 
resources. We even had a dozen Chinese engineers all briefed, 
translated, and NDA-signed but couldn't get export control approval in 
time. It drove me nuts for three months. I'm more than a bit pissed 
about that one.

Anyway, I hope you are happy with the results of what we are all 
releasing. The core team here has worked almost non-stop for weeks on 
this to get ready for the final push. We wanted to do more, you know 
that, but hey, look at where we were last year and look at the potential 
tomorrow brings. Also, the OpenSolaris team internally really has been 
genuine in their intentions, I can assure you. At times we've not been 
as open as we could have been -- we get that -- but I hope you believe 
me when I say that many people on the team fought hard on your behalf 
all year long. Every time you told us we were full of shit on something 
we took it to heart and it went up line. There were a few, ah, heated, 
conversations regarding some of the issues that were discussed in the 
pilot. We won some and we lost some, but every time we moved a little 
closer to our goal of openness. As you've seen, this stuff takes time. I 
wish we could have exposed more of that process to you. Next time it 
will probably be easier to do that.

As this program has grown it's garnered attention from all across Sun 
and from Sun's competitors and supporters. Just recently, I've heard 
from executives and engineers traveling to South America and to Asia, 
and they report that there *absolutely* is massive community interest 
out there. Even Wall Street has noticed. Some people are probably a bit 
confused since the Solaris community was supposed to be dead by now. 
Well, too bad. It's too late. They lost their window of opportunity to 
crush us. Our next step is to stay positive and to engage the interest 
we know is there, make it tangible, and grow this OpenSolaris community.

In a very real way, you've all been part of something special here. 
You've helped change this company and potentially an entire market along 
the way. Some people may not know this quite yet, but they'll surely 
find out tomorrow. You are some of the most knowledgeable people in the 
world about Solaris, and you've help make OpenSolaris a possibility. 
Congratulations and we'll see you on the other side.

Jim

February 07, 2010

Simon Phipps☞ Worrying Trend

February 07, 2010 09:39 PM GMT

Simon Phipps☞ The Advance of Open

February 07, 2010 09:39 PM GMT

Jim GrisanzioWin the War, Write the History

February 07, 2010 02:13 PM GMT

It matters greatly who wins the war because the winners write the history and they rarely -- if ever -- characterize events accurately. That's what makes history fun. It's a puzzle and it's always changing. In this case I'm talking about Caesar, who in 58 A.D. destroyed the Celts in Gaul (France), killed and enslaved millions, took the gold, propagandized the history, and went on to rule Rome as Emperor. Nice guy. That is of you like vicious dudes running psychotic military dictatorships. But whatever. The point is that the Romans won, so their view of things survived throughout the ages. But I'm more interested in what was lost? What did the Romans conveniently leave out of their history?

For that, check out The Primitive Celts, an entertaining and fascinating look at the Celts, who the Romans say were mere barbarians. But were they? Seems some archaeologists are discovering the Celts actually had a highly developed society with the most advanced calender at the time and a sophisticated economy based on a variety of trades. They minded gold all across Europe, and they built a vast network of roads to facilitate international trade. Generally, the contrast to Rome was nearly total. Where the Celts decentralized things into a web and community-like structure, the Romans centralized them into a rigid hierarchy. And that proved a critical and fatal difference -- at least in ancient times. Centralization won. Big time, actually.

But I wonder if that distinction remains true today. What's the better concept around which to build a society in 2010? And, more importantly, who wins the war when these differences collide for whatever reason? Surely the world today is substantially different than when the Romans were wrecking the place two thousand years ago, but would their systems prevail today? You can look at this from the perspective of a county or a company or even a project. It's just the management of resources to achieve a goal. Nothing more. But my question asks which is better and who wins now?

February 05, 2010

Jim GrisanzioOpenSolaris Rocks Serbia

February 05, 2010 05:43 PM GMT

Here is a nice example from Serbia demonstrating the value of building a local OpenSolaris community. It can lead to some very interesting organizations paying very close attention to what you are doing. Congrats, guys! Some of the OpenSolaris User Groups are doing some really interesting work out there, and they are contributing to the overall community in a very big way.

Robert MilkowskiData Corruption - ZFS saves the day, again

February 05, 2010 12:32 PM GMT
We came across an interesting issue with data corruption and I think it might be interesting to some of you. While preparing a new cluster deployment and filling it up with data we suddenly started to see below messages:

XXX cl_runtime: [ID 856360 kern.warning] WARNING: QUORUM_GENERIC: quorum_read_keys error:
Reading the registration keys failed on quorum device /dev/did/rdsk/d7s2 with error 22.

The d7 quorum device was marked as being offline and we could not bring it online again. There isn't much in documentation about the above message except that it is probably a firmware problem on a disk array and we should contact a vendor. But lets investigate first what is really going on.

By looking at the source code I found that the above message is printed from within quorum_device_generic_impl::quorum_read_keys() and it will only happen if quorum_pgre_key_read() returns with return code 22 (actually any other than 0 or EACCESS but from the syslog message we already suspect that the return code is 22).

The quorum_pgre_key_read() calls quorum_scsi_sector_read() and passes its return code as its own. The quorum_scsi_sector_read() will return with an error only if quorum_ioctl_with_retries() returns with an error or if there is a checksum mismatch.

This is the relevant source code:

406 int
407 quorum_scsi_sector_read(
[...]
449 error = quorum_ioctl_with_retries(vnode_ptr, USCSICMD, (intptr_t)&ucmd,
450 &retval);
451 if (error != 0) {
452 CMM_TRACE(("quorum_scsi_sector_read: ioctl USCSICMD "
453 "returned error (%d).\n", error));
454 kmem_free(ucmd.uscsi_rqbuf, (size_t)SENSE_LENGTH);
455 return (error);
456 }
457
458 //
459 // Calculate and compare the checksum if check_data is true.
460 // Also, validate the pgres_id string at the beg of the sector.
461 //
462 if (check_data) {
463 PGRE_CALCCHKSUM(chksum, sector, iptr);
464
465 // Compare the checksum.
466 if (PGRE_GETCHKSUM(sector) != chksum) {
467 CMM_TRACE(("quorum_scsi_sector_read: "
468 "checksum mismatch.\n"));
469 kmem_free(ucmd.uscsi_rqbuf, (size_t)SENSE_LENGTH);
470 return (EINVAL);
471 }
472
473 //
474 // Validate the PGRE string at the beg of the sector.
475 // It should contain PGRE_ID_LEAD_STRING[1|2].
476 //
477 if ((os::strncmp((char *)sector->pgres_id, PGRE_ID_LEAD_STRING1,
478 strlen(PGRE_ID_LEAD_STRING1)) != 0) &&
479 (os::strncmp((char *)sector->pgres_id, PGRE_ID_LEAD_STRING2,
480 strlen(PGRE_ID_LEAD_STRING2)) != 0)) {
481 CMM_TRACE(("quorum_scsi_sector_read: pgre id "
482 "mismatch. The sector id is %s.\n",
483 sector->pgres_id));
484 kmem_free(ucmd.uscsi_rqbuf, (size_t)SENSE_LENGTH);
485 return (EINVAL);
486 }
487
488 }
489 kmem_free(ucmd.uscsi_rqbuf, (size_t)SENSE_LENGTH);
490
491 return (error);
492 }

With a simple DTrace script I could verify if the quorum_scsi_sector_read() does indeed return with 22 and also I could print what else is going on within the function:

56 -> __1cXquorum_scsi_sector_read6FpnFvnode_LpnLpgre_sector_b_i_ 6308555744942019 enter
56 -> __1cZquorum_ioctl_with_retries6FpnFvnode_ilpi_i_ 6308555744957176 enter
56 <- __1cZquorum_ioctl_with_retries6FpnFvnode_ilpi_i_ 6308555745089857 rc: 0
56 -> __1cNdbg_print_bufIdbprintf6MpcE_v_ 6308555745108310 enter
56 -> __1cNdbg_print_bufLdbprintf_va6Mbpcrpv_v_ 6308555745120941 enter
56 -> __1cCosHsprintf6FpcpkcE_v_ 6308555745134231 enter
56 <- __1cCosHsprintf6FpcpkcE_v_ 6308555745148729 rc: 2890607504684
56 <- __1cNdbg_print_bufLdbprintf_va6Mbpcrpv_v_ 6308555745162898 rc: 1886718112
56 <- __1cNdbg_print_bufIdbprintf6MpcE_v_ 6308555745175529 rc: 1886718112
56 <- __1cXquorum_scsi_sector_read6FpnFvnode_LpnLpgre_sector_b_i_ 6308555745188599 rc: 22

From the above output we know that the quorum_ioctl_with_retries() returns with 0 so it must be a checksum mismatch! As CMM_TRACE() is being called above and there are only three of them in the code lets check with DTrace which one it is:

21 -> __1cNdbg_print_bufIdbprintf6MpcE_v_ 6309628794339298 quorum_scsi_sector_read: checksum mismatch.

So now I knew exactly what part of the code is casing the quorum device to be marked offline. The issue might have been caused by many things like: a bug in a disk array firmware, a problem on an SAN, a bug in a HBA's firmware, a bug in a qlc driver or a bug in SC software, or... However because the issue suggests a data corruption and we are loading the cluster with a copy of a database we might have a bigger issue that just an offline quorum device. The configuration is a such that we are using ZFS to mirror between two disks arrays. We have been restoring a couple of TBs of data into and we haven't read almost anything back. Thankfully it is ZFS so we might force a re-check off all data in the pool and I did. ZFS found 14 corrupted blocks and even identified which file is affected. The interesting thing here is that for all blocks both copies on both sides of the mirror were affected. This almost eliminates a possibility of a firmware problem on disk arrays and suggest that the issue was caused by something misbehaving on the host itself. There is still a possibility of an issue on SAN as well. It is very unlikely to be a bug in ZFS as the corruption affected reservation keys as well which has basically nothing to do with ZFS at all. Then we are still writing more and more data into the pool and I'm repeating scrubs and I'm not getting any new corrupted blocks nor quorum is misbehaving (I fixed it by temporarily adding another one, removing the original and re-adding it again while removing the temporary one).

While I still have to find what caused the data corruption the most important thing here is ZFS. Just think about it - what would happen if we were running on any other file system like: UFS, VxFS, ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS, ... Well, almost anything could have happened with them like some data of could be corrupted, some files lost, system could crash, fsck could be forced to run for many hours and still not being able to fix the filesystem and it definitely wouldn't be able to detect any data corruption withing files or everything would be running fine for days, months and then suddenly the system would panic, etc. when application would try to access the corrupted blocks for the first time. Thanks to ZFS what have actually happened? All corrupted blocks were identified, unfortunately both mirrored copies were affected so ZFS can't fix them but it did identified a single file which was affected by all these blocks. We can just remove the file which is only 2GB and restore it again. And all of these while the system was running and we haven't even stopped the restore or didn't have to start from the beginning. Most importantly there is no uncertainty about the state of the filesystem or data within it.

The other important conclusion is that DTrace is a sysadmin's best friend :)


Jim GrisanzioOpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210: Photos

February 05, 2010 08:20 AM GMT

Some images from the OpenSolaris Night Seminar in Tokyo earlier this evening with presentations from Junko Yoshida, Mami Sueki, and Shoji Haraguchi. Video from Shoji Haraguchi here.

OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210 OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210

OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210 OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210

OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210 OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210

OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210 OpenSolaris Night Seminar 012210

Hundreds more images from the OpenSolaris community in Japan right here.

Jim GrisanzioBuilding International Communities in Tokyo

February 05, 2010 08:16 AM GMT
Here are two really nice articles in the Japan Times talking about the international tech community in Tokyo:
The articles describe the meta community here, and that's where we OpenSolaris guys hang out. By contributing to the larger community, we've found that the OpenSolaris community here is growing and earning its way right along side everyone else. There are language and culture barriers to overcome, but we all are making a great deal of progress. It's quite common now to find OpenSolaris developers, administrators, and users participating in multiple international communities, which, of course, helps us to learn in return. And the Web 2.0 community is growing in size and diversity as well. Also, since the tech community locally is well connected globally, we can extend our reach around the world by just interacting right here at home. Here's my photo archive as well (mostly Linux & OpenSolaris).

February 04, 2010

Ben RockwoodJonathan Says Goodbye via Twitter Haiku

February 04, 2010 06:49 PM GMT

The message was simple:

Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

Please post your thoughts on Jonathan's leaving. Its a mixed emotion... on one hand he set some great goals and put a fire under things. A lot of us believed in him. And yet, he failed to execute and ultimately was responsible for Sun's demise. Could someone else have done a better job and still kept the culture alive? I don't know honestly.

I'll continue to stay neutral on the subject and reserve judgment until the behind-the-scenes stories trickle out over the next months and years. Jonathan screwed up, yes, but I think that Jonathan also got screwed himself, more than we realize. Time will tell.

In other news, Oracle is finally doing what has needed to be done for years: Oracle to Revamp Sun Supply Chain. One of the biggest complaints by customers for years has been inability to get timely delivery of systems. Its good to see signs of that era ending.

Also, Project Darkstar & Kenai are being axed. Project Kenai, a SourceForge like project hosting service provided free by Sun, will close its doors on April 2nd 2010. You have untill then to get stuff out. One of the most important projects there, Immutable Service Containers (ISC) has moved to OpenSolaris.org.

Simon Phipps☞ More on H.264

February 04, 2010 02:00 PM GMT

February 03, 2010

Jim GrisanzioLinux & Solaris

February 03, 2010 07:23 AM GMT
What's the Future of Linux and Solaris at Oracle?: Larry Ellison: "We've been in the open source business a very long time. We've been a distributor of Apache and we have our own version of Linux  ... We have no problems having both Linux and Solaris and we want to make them both better ... I'm a Linux fan and if you want Linux we have the best Linux in the world. If you want UNIX, we have the best UNIX in the world."

Works for me. I already use both systems and participate in both communities.

February 02, 2010

Ben RockwoodOPEN LETTER TO ORACLE: (Open)Solaris Roadmap

February 02, 2010 10:06 PM GMT

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 fantastic, there are many questions customers have regarding the future of Solaris, OpenSolaris and the technologies within. It's no secret that for several months Oracle has been involved to some degree in Sun engineering directions and therefore it does not seem unreasonable to ask for answers even so soon after the EU green-light.

First, and of foremost concern, is the future of the Solaris product for enterprise customer, currently "Solaris 10". Will there be a Solaris 11? (It would fit nicely with Oracle's scheme, btw.) Will it be compatible with existing Solaris technologies (Jumpstart, SysV PKGs, etc) or will the existing path to scrap these technologies in favor of new and unproven solutions created within the OpenSolaris platform be chosen instead?

Please understand that until recently customers could choose the traditional product (Solaris 10), the advanced development product (OpenSolaris Distribution), or use the bridge between these two worlds: Solaris Express Community Edition(SX:CE). However, with SX:CE's recent retirement Solaris shops are forced to make a choice: go forward and accept uncomfortable and disruptive changes of OpenSolaris Distro or fall back into the technically inferior but fully supported and well understood Solaris 10. Sadly, some are opting to leave all together due to a lack of direction.

Decisions need to be made and customers need guidance in order to make them. Consistent with Sun's legacy, the OpenSolaris project has been phenomenally successful in empowering customers and driving innovation, however management has continually failed to produce a coherent roadmap for enterprises to bank on.

Therefore, I would humbly ask that Oracle definitively provide guidance on the following:

I look forward to these details which will hopefully put an end to the Solaris FUD and put us back on a path of profitable and productive growth, for the sake of the community, customers, and Oracle itself.

Ben Rockwood
(Open)Solaris Developer & Evangelist

Jim GrisanzioHalf Way to Closing the Stage

February 02, 2010 07:22 PM GMT
We said at the October 27, 2009 move to hub.opensolaris.org that we`d keep stage.opensolaris.org available for 6 months with a snapshot of the content we migrated to the new site in case people needed it as a reference for cleaning up their Collectives. Or if some files didn`t migrate properly, we could do those manually. Or if people just wanted to check formatting. Well, this is a reminder that we are half way though that time period, and stage.opensolaris.org will be decommissioned at the end of April 2010. If you need to reference your old content, please do so before that time. We`ll send monthly reminders until the final date. And I can`t believe it`s been three months already. Time flies, having fun, and all that.

February 01, 2010

Rich TeerApple's iPad

February 01, 2010 06:33 PM GMT
Apple recently announced their long-awaited iPad. Here's a very brief summary of my thoughts of this cool new widget:

* No camera for taking photos
* No iSight camera for visual comms (e.g., Skype)
* No built-in mic
* No multitasking
* No support for Java or Flash
* No phone capability

In other words,

* No thankyou!

It seems I'm not the only one disappointed by the iPad:

Jim GrisanzioOpenSolaris in India's Digit

February 01, 2010 01:29 PM GMT
Abhishek Kumar, the leader of the Mumbai OpenSolaris User Group in India, surely gets the star of the month for getting OpenSolaris into Digit, India's largest IT magazine. There will be a 100,000 copies of this special 96 page mini book -- "Fast Track to OpenSolaris" -- on Install, ZFS, DTrace, Source Juicer, etc. Check out the contents of the February magazine shipment. Nice to see OpenSolaris on one of the DVDs. See Abhishek's announcement here. Beautiful cover on that mini book, eh?

opensolais in digit

Jim GrisanzioNew Element in the OpenSolaris Bible Project

February 01, 2010 09:05 AM GMT

There's a new element coming to the OpenSolaris Bible translation project. Michael Sullivan, an OpenSolaris developer in Tokyo, has joined the project started a few months ago by Ken Okubo. Michael is building a series of technical presentations based on the book to help validate the translation into Japanese and also help get the book's content out into the community. He'll be talking about the idea at various community events in Tokyo (Tokyo2Point0, Tokyo Linux User Group, OpenSolaris User Group) to get people involved, and then we'll schedule the presentations as part of the Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group meetings (date TBD). Discussions are also taking place in the community (here, here) about this latest phase of the project.

January 31, 2010

Jim GrisanzioTokyo OpenSolaris Study Group 013010

January 31, 2010 04:16 PM GMT

There were two sessions (beginners/advanced) at the monthly Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group on Saturday:

OpenSolaris Study Group 013010

OpenSolaris Study Group 013010


A third concurrent session will be opened hopefully starting in February or March. More info soon. Subscribe to ug-jposug and ug-tsug to participate.

More info about the OpenSolaris communtiy in Japan here. More OpenSolaris photos here.

Jim GrisanzioBuilding Communities by Building Schools

January 31, 2010 04:11 PM GMT

"We don't want our babies to die, and we want our children to go to school"

That's what motivates Greg Mortenson to build communities because that's what women tell him in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They don't want their kids to die. So to help out, Greg builds schools -- in a region of the world that has known only war and poverty for generations. Hear Greg tell his story to Bill Moyers on PBS.

There are many more videos and articles about Greg and his foundations and books. Just a wonderful story all around. Even the highest levels of the U.S Military are now reading his book -- Three Cups of Tea -- and they are listening to him in the field because he knows more about the culture on the ground than most Americans involved in the battle over there. He's not fighting terrorism, tough. He's building community. There's a difference. The first action is defensive, based on fear, and short term. The second is offensive, based on inspiration, and long term. One breaks. The other builds. But this no hand out from some rich guy in the West or even a government program. Greg is not rich and he built his organization from pretty much nothing. And people of modest means -- and kids with pennies! -- create and drive these programs. Not the rich. Not the governments. In this case, individuals make the difference and that's why it's so inspiring. And the schools have to be earned, too. Educational leadership and resources are contributed from the outside, of course, but things are distributed and managed locally as well. Land is given for free and so is labor. This way the local community owns what they build.

This guys knows what he's doing, and he figured it out in real time. I just tripped over him today, but he's been doing this for sixteen years. I will study him closely. Everything he does represents a repeatable model for building community anywhere in the world for any purpose. Think you can't do something? Think it's too hard? You must check this out. Very cool.

Peter TribbleA better terminal, part 2

January 31, 2010 03:28 PM GMT
Thanks for the comments on my search for a better terminal.

First. Eterm. So if I build it with gcc, it SEGVs on me, and it won't compile with Studio 12. I used to use it, but don't seem to have a working version available right now.

As for providing a binary for evilvte, I'm not sure how useful that is. The only way to configure it is to build from source. And I'm pretty sure my configuration choices are likely to be different from anyone else's.

On to terminator. (Which one? This one, or that one?) The first one fails to build for me - not only does it require a non-standard make, it requires a particular version of that non-standard make, and one my regular Solaris 10 box doesn't have. The second one just gives a python traceback.

Then there's the whole rxvt family. I actually use rxvt quite a bit, when I want to run something (like top) in a throwaway terminal window, due to how lightweight it is. But it has to be said that it's nowhere near as lightweight as it was, and urxvt is much heavier than xterm. There are little irritants too, such urxvt needs its own terminfo entry adding, which is just another barrier. Or not being able to override rxvt's uses of a stipple pattern in the xterm-style scrollbar (I always make it solid).

I've tried quite a few others, most of which plain don't build.

Jim GrisanzioThe Wonders of Propaganda

January 31, 2010 03:15 PM GMT

How could I not read an article in USA Today with a headline like this? Psychologists: Propaganda works better than you think.

It's true, of course. I find propaganda is a remarkably effective tool, and it's far more sophisticated in democracies than it is in totalitarian societies (see Chomsky here and here and a million other places, and also see David Barstow's reports on the media and the Pentagon -- video, article, article -- for a well-known and recent example). But what I found most interesting in the USA Today piece was the assertion that accurate information may not counteract propaganda very well and actually could help transmit it. If that's true, would it make sense to be more assertive in communications to drive the agenda and then to ignore critics (or at least the vicious and extreme ones)? I suppose this strategy wouldn't necessarily work in all cases, and there are certainly some very effective techniques to deposition attackers. But just tossing out good information in a attempt to thwart the bad stuff may not be a good use of time. Having the good information well documented so you can rapidly point to it for those interested is required, of course, but it's the never-ending iterative arguing that I think I'm done with. I've been trying this for about a year now, and I find it more effective than my earlier pattern of responding to everything in an attempt to change minds. I gave up. Plus, it's not as exhausting.

Propaganda fascinates me. I keep track at this tag: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/tags/propaganda

January 30, 2010

Peter TribbleLooking for a better terminal

January 30, 2010 06:08 PM GMT
It sometimes seems I spend most of my life in xterm, usually logged into a remote server.

And while xterm isn't bad, as terminal emulators go, sometimes I want a bit more jazz and reliability. Recently xterm hasn't been as reliable as it should be, and it also doesn't cut it for some use cases - logged into a Sun (oops, Oracle...) ILOM, for instance. Things like color, background images, transparency, all break up the monotony,

Locally on my work desktop I run gnome-terminal for some stuff - it's heavy resource consumption is offset by the fact that I'm running a lot of windows. But it doesn't work half as well on remote servers or under other graphical environments. And gnome-terminal is a resource hog.

At home I run Xfce, and the Terminal is just as functional as gnome-terminal but with only half the resource requirements. One showstopper (and this is a real killer for a large number of otherwise decent applications) is its requirement for D-Bus, which makes it far too difficult to run standalone in an arbitrary environment.

So I've been looking at some alternatives, and quite like evilvte. It's functionally equivalent to gnome-terminal and the Xfce Terminal, using the same vte widget, but even lighter weight and faster and with much reduced dependencies. (In particular, no D-Bus.) So it could be used as a replacement for xterm.

Building it is somewhat manual. (But no stupid build system to fight with.) And configuration is a case of editing config.h and running make again to rebuild the binary. But I like it.

Jim GrisanzioLeadership via Action

January 30, 2010 03:10 PM GMT

So many people claim they lead. Maybe they have a big hairy title or powerful position or know someone special, or maybe they just have lots of cash and feel we should all follow along quietly. There`s even a whole industry of "leadership" with books and seminars and all sorts of guys spinning up what it means to lead. I used to think all that was pretty cool (or interesting to study, anyway), but not any longer. Spotting leadership is simple. Look around the room, look for who`s talking and for who`s doing. Follow the ones doing. Chances are those people won`t bark orders to you, but instead they`ll encourage you to work right along with them and you`ll want to. You see, real leaders don`t duck when things get hot. They don`t get hard to find when things get confusing or uncertain. They don`t tell others what to do, either. They just step up and act because things need to get done. Leadership is demonstrated via action, and anyone can lead because anyone can act. Everything else is chit-chat.

Alvaro Lopez OrtegaNext destination The Gambia

January 30, 2010 02:54 PM GMT

It's been a while since the last time I post something unrelated to my work or the projects I'm working on. Of course, that doesn't mean I've been doing nothing but working. In fact, a whole lot of things have happened in the past few months.

The thing I personally enjoyed the most was an amazing, one month long trip to Southeast Asia. I must admit, I didn't know much about the region, and I was very pleasantly surprised about what a great place to visit it turned out to be.

Thailand

Laos

Cambodia

Vietnam

Singapore

Indonesia

Actually, we have been eager to make a new trip since we came back in October. We wanted it to be something different. Since our previous destination was Asia, and Europe and America was not appealing enough at this moment, we chose Africa as the next destination. More specifically, we planed a week long trip to The Gambia.

We'll be leaving to Banjul within a few hours. I am pretty excited about it! :-)

What does that mean? Firstly, I'll be off for a week. I won't commit any code to Cherokee, CTK or any of the projects I'm involved with. Ohhh.. and I'll forget about 'bellow zero degree Celsius' temperatures, it's quite warm over there. Hurray!! :-)

Simon Phipps☞ Why H.264 Must Be Avoided

January 30, 2010 02:33 PM GMT

January 29, 2010

Peter TribbleStupid build systems

January 29, 2010 08:39 PM GMT
There was a time when building software was easy. You typed make and it almost always worked. Sometimes you had to know the secret incantation of xmkmf -a, but usually if make didn't work straight off the software wasn't worth using.

In the advanced days of the 21st century, of course, such simplicity - something that actually works - is rarely to be found. We have things like the autotools (the evil behind ./configure) that basically involves making a bunch of unsubstantiated guesses about your system and constructing a random build configuration based on it. And heaven help you if libtool gets its teeth into your software - it's almost guaranteed to miscompile your software in a manner that's undebuggable and unfixable.

So cmake promised to be a welcome relief from this madness. Only it's not. I've been having a go at building the awesome window manager on Solaris. When it works I'll post more details, but I almost flipped when having fought it into submission and built it successfully, I did the install and saw:

-- Removed runtime path from "/packages/awesome/bin/awesome"

And, on checking, it had done exactly that - stripped out the RPATH information so the binary it had carefully built stood no chance whatsoever of actually working.

And this is progress?

Ben RockwoodTransition & Closure as Oracle Takes the Con

January 29, 2010 03:13 PM GMT

On Jan 27th Sun, as an independent company, died and Oracle's reign begins. No time was wasted. As you no doubt have noticed by now, sun.com redirects to Oracle.com, which is in keeping with its acquisition history... but even so it happened quicker than I expected. No time being wasted.

Oracle hosted a 5 hour (yes, 5) event in Redwood City (Oracle HQ) to lay out its strategy for Sun.

Find all the above webcasts, both full and highlights, plus slide decks, here: Oracle + Sun: Transforming the IT Industry. If you only watch one, make sure to watch the final webcast with Larry which is an open Q&A.

(Selfish note: Joyent's logo is on the customers slide in the Operating Systems and Virtualization presentation. w00t.)

This is followed up by a Oracle + Sun Welcome Event world tour beginning in March. Look for an event near you.

In addition, several webcasts have been produce in the last couple weeks discussing technologies and the strategy going forward. Find them all here: Oracle + Sun Product Strategy Webcast Series.

So onto the guys who got us here in the first place.

Jonathan returns to blogging, "With the passing of that milestone, I can once again speak freely", in Where Life Takes Me Next.... He tells us how great things will be now that he's not running the company, points us to his Twitter feed, and yet again extols the brilliance of Greg Papadopoulos.

Now, I probably shouldn't pick a fight with Mr. Papadopoulos, but here goes. We hear again and again how brilliant this guy is... but look where we are. Seriously, how can you stand on the ruins of a fallen empire saved only because a neighbor took pity on us, and then tell us how brilliant one of the guys in charge was? I know I'm going to regret saying that, but he should have been smart enough to beat some sense into folks. I digress....

Scott McNealy, who took over for Jonathan either because the job wasn't getting done or because he wanted to take credit for "saving" the company (I'm not sure which yet; maybe both), sent out a old-skool company wide memo: Subject: Thanks for a great 28 years. Best summary of the situation was: "This is a very powerful merger. And way better than some of the alternatives we were facing. " Then he starts threading in capitalism, almost blaming but not blaming, the system as a whole for stacking the deck. I sense a story behind it all.

Scott gives us the answer to the horrible question "Why?!?!" We all know it, but its good to hear him admit it: "And though we did not monetize our inventions as well as we could have..." Under. Statment. Of. All Time.

Jim GrisanzioOracle+Sun: Finally

January 29, 2010 04:32 AM GMT
Oracle articulates the new strategy of Oracle+Sun. Webcast. Release. Final. Presos.

Jim GrisanzioOpenSolaris Night Seminar, January 22, Tokyo

January 29, 2010 04:28 AM GMT

Shoji Haraguchi just announced the next OpenSolaris Night Seminar in Tokyo. It will be on January 22nd in Jingumae. On tap will be Crossbow and Solaris Containers. Register early. These seminars generally fill up pretty quickly, and there's only room for about 100 people in the room. You know, we really could use some bigger conference rooms to hold these events. Lots of people are interested in OpenSolaris in Tokyo. See you there.

Jim GrisanzioUpcoming OSUG Leader Events: Russia, India

January 29, 2010 04:20 AM GMT
There are two OpenSolaris User Group leader events coming up in Hyderabad, India (March 26-27) and St. Petersburg, Russia (April 10-11), and some travel sponsorships are available as well. See Teresa Giacomini for details.

January 28, 2010

Dennis ClarkeI ordered the last Sun Solaris media kit!? Awesome.

January 28, 2010 04:20 PM GMT

    Last week I saw that the transition was near for Sun. I wanted just one more Solaris Media Kit. Maybe even the last one they ever ship as Sun Microsystems Inc. It may arrive as an “Oracle Solaris Media” kit. I don't know. Here are the order details :

read more

Cyril PliskoThe King is dead. Long live the King.

January 28, 2010 12:54 PM GMT
Well, I guess everybody have seen this already. It leaves mixed feelings, as on one hand it is something that you've always counted on being here that vanished. On the other hand it can be a new beginning. I was somewhat surprised it took only a few moments to turn everything into red-white palette. I guess I will miss Sun's traditional gray/blue colors. And seeing "Oracle Solaris" does make funny feelings.

Alan HargreavesMigrating this Blog

January 28, 2010 02:00 AM GMT

As appears to be all the rage at the moment, due to a change in Corporate Blogging Policy, I've relocated this blog to alanhargreaves.wordpress.com. That blog will be for all kinds of things either work related or of other interest. I should also mention that I have created a Music specific blog at alanhargreaves.blogspot.com that I am specifically writing about stuff related to music and the network and things like that.

See you on the other side!

January 27, 2010

Jonathan SchwartzWhere Life Takes Me Next...

January 27, 2010 07:53 PM GMT
You've probably seen the news - the Sun/Oracle transaction has closed. With the passing of that milestone, I can once again speak freely.

Having had nine months to accelerate down the runway, there's not a doubt in my mind Oracle's takeoff and ascent will be fast and dramatic. I wish the combined entity the best of luck, and have enormous confidence in the opportunity.

Greg Papadopoulos, one of the brightest people I've ever known, once made a very interesting statement - all technology ultimately becomes a fashion item. It was true for timekeeping, and it's definitely true of computing and telecommunications. To that law, I'd like to add a simple corollary: the technology industry only gets more interesting. It's been true my entire life.

As for where life takes me next, you should follow me via Twitter at openjonathan to find out. I'll also be rehosting this blog (and again, stay tuned to Twitter by following me here). I expect to do my part to keep things interesting.

Thank you for your support and commitment. I wish you all the best of luck building, taking advantage of (and likely wearing) the future!

Jonathan Schwartz
CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Oracle Corporation.

Keith WesolowskiCross of Lorraine

January 27, 2010 07:06 PM GMT

Peter TribbleSolaris Containers and Shared Memory

January 27, 2010 04:14 PM GMT
I've been migrating some old systems from truly antique Sun boxes onto a small number of new Sun T5240s. Lots of zones, one per new physical system.

This includes some truly antique versions of oracle.

In order to keep the version police happy with the compatibility matrix, they wanted Solaris 8. Despite the fact that it works fine with Solaris 10, they insisted on Solaris 8. Enter Solaris 8 Containers.

Now, Solaris 10 has reasonable default shared memory settings. However, the Solaris 8 Container gives a faithful emulation of a Solaris 8 system, including miserly shared memory settings. How to set better values, because the normal Solaris 10 games don't apply?

The solution is simple, so simple that it never actually occurred to me. Simply put the settings you want in the Container's /etc/system file in the traditional way, and reboot the Container.

Simon Phipps☞ Endings

January 27, 2010 02:35 PM GMT

Jim GrisanzioOn Being Genuine

January 27, 2010 08:29 AM GMT

McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun: "Scott McNealy, the smack-talking co-founder and long-running leader of Sun Microsystems, has bid adieu to his company in a memo that mixes nostalgia with a rallying cry for employees about to become part of Oracle. The memo, sent Tuesday under the subject line 'Thanks for a great 28 years,' has more genuine emotion than you'll see in a year's worth of official communications from most corporate leaders." -- Stephen Shankland, DeepTech, Cnet News.

I think those of us who have worked with Scott or interacted with him in any way would agree. It's something you feel and you feel it right away.

January 26, 2010

Simon Phipps☞ Access To The Party

January 26, 2010 02:44 PM GMT

Peter TribblePreconfiguring Containers with sysidcfg

January 26, 2010 01:38 PM GMT
You can preconfigure a Solaris Zone by placing a valid sysidcfg file into /etc/sysidcfg in the zone, so it finds all the information when it boots.

What's also true, at least for native zones on Solaris 10, is that you can specify a cut-down sysidcfg file. For example:

network_interface=PRIMARY {
hostname=mars
}
system_locale=C
timezone=US/Pacific
name_service=NIS {
domain_name=foo.com
name_server=bar.foo.com(192.168.1.1)
}
security_policy=NONE
terminal=xterm
root_password=0123456789abcd
nfs4_domain=foo.com

If you try doing this on a Solaris 8 Container, it will go interactive. So you need to supply a bit more information. Such as:

network_interface=PRIMARY {
hostname=mars
netmask=255.255.255.0
protocol_ipv6=no
}
system_locale=C
timezone=US/Pacific
name_service=NIS {
domain_name=foo.com
name_server=bar.foo.com(192.168.1.1)
}
timeserver=localhost
security_policy=NONE
terminal=xterm
root_password=0123456789abcd

where I've added the netmask and protocol_ipv6 settings to the network_interface section, and told it a timeserver. Clearly the Solaris 10 zone can work these out for itself, but a Solaris 8 branded zone needs to be told explicitly. (Also, it doesn't need the nfs4_domain, as that makes no sense for a Solaris 8 system.)

Jim GrisanzioUpdating Website Community Space

January 26, 2010 10:04 AM GMT

Spent some time cleaning up the content in the Website Community yesterday. The transition to auth/xwiki is over, so I rewrote a lot of the content we had pointing to the project management docs and moved some content to archive to clean up the nav. I cut the amount of content on the top level page in half. Roadmap & Announcements updated too. Over the last few months, we've accumulated a huge amount of information about the website project and various community processes. Still streamlining. Next needs to address the front page of the site.

January 25, 2010

Ben RockwoodHaiti: Fact Finding Mission, Churches Helping Churches

January 25, 2010 06:56 PM GMT

A coalition of churches quickly formed following the quake in Haiti, Churches Helping Churches, made up of several churches including Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. They went on site last week to assist the churches in Haiti and assess the needs.

Yesterday Pastor Mark preached a special sermon which told the entire story of his trip. If your interested in the situation on the ground in Haiti and particularly in the state of the churches there watch the sermon here: 32 Hours in Haiti

If you would like to help the churches in Haiti to continue helping the people of Haiti please consider a donation to churcheshelpingchurches.com.

Simon Phipps☞ Making A Stand

January 25, 2010 12:36 PM GMT

January 24, 2010

Simon Phipps☞ Protecting Freedom

January 24, 2010 12:21 PM GMT

January 23, 2010

Peter TribbleCompressing Backup Catalogs

January 23, 2010 03:50 PM GMT
Backup solutions such as NetBackup keep a catalog so that you can find a file that you need to get back. Clearly, with a fair amount of data being backed up, the catalog can become very large. I'm just sizing a replacement backup system, and catalog size (and the storage for it) is a significant part of the problem.

One way that NetBackup deals with this is to compress old catalogs. On my Solaris server it seems to use the old compress command, which gives you about 3-fold compression by the looks of it: 3.7G goes to 1.2G, for example.

However, there's a problem: in order to read an old catalog (in order to find something from an old backup) it has to be uncompressed. There's quite a delay while this happens, and even worse, you need disk space to handle the uncompressed catalog.

Playing about the other day, I wondered about using filesystem compression rather than application compression, with ZFS in mind. So, for that 3.7G sample:

CompressionSize
Application1.2G
ZFS default1.4G
ZFS gzip-1920M
ZFS gzip-9939M


Even with the ZFS default, we're doing almost as well. With gzip, we do much better. (And it's odd that gzip-9 does worse than gzip-1.)

However, even though the default level of compression doesn't compress the data quite as well as the application does, it's still much better to use ZFS to do the compression, as then you can compress all the data: if you leave it to the application then you always leave the recent data uncompressed for easy access, and only compress the old stuff. So assume a catalog twice the size above, and that we used NetBackup to compress half the catalog, then the disk used in the application case would be 3.7G uncompressed and 1.2G compressed. The total disk usage comes out as:

CompressionSize
Application4.9G
ZFS default2.8G
ZFS gzip-11.8G
ZFS gzip-91.8G


The conclusion is pretty clear: forget about getting NetBackup to compress its catalog, and get ZFS (or any other compressing filesystem) to do the job instead.

Jim GrisanzioSome Nite Shots Last Night

January 23, 2010 03:49 AM GMT

The first two images are from the bathroom at the Sun building in Yoga looking down on the rooftop tennis court and hot tub next to the Tomei Expressway.

Hot Tub on Top Tennis on Top

Then these two are from my office (which is a tiny cube) looking down on the tollgate sucking money out of the cars flying by on the Tomei.

Toll Toll

Then later on I almost got clipped by a masked man driving a little scooter down at street level in Jingumae. He probably buzzed me since he saw me earlier stepping out into the street to take his picture.

Scooter Buzz Scooter Buzz

January 22, 2010

Jim GrisanzioUpdated XWiki for OpenSolaris

January 22, 2010 07:43 AM GMT
xwiki for opensolarisChris updated our implementation of XWiki yesterday to v2.1.1, which fixes a bunch of bugs we had been living with while using v1.8. The current bug list for hub is on defect.opensolaris.org, so please file any issues there. Also note we doubled the number of languages we are supporting with this update (screen of 17 language codes). See the localization page if you want to contribute translations. More website application updates to come: auth, repo, and poll are on tap next. Roadmap here.

Jim GrisanzioMore Tokyo Tower

January 22, 2010 05:33 AM GMT
Added a few shots of a few sections of Tokyo Tower the other night ...

Tokyo Tower

I like this old tower much better than the new one being built, but I suppose life moves on.

January 21, 2010

Ben RockwoodLarry Gets What Larry Wants: Sun Now Oracle

January 21, 2010 05:36 PM GMT

Its all over folks. Oracle buys Sun, EU approved.

There will be a Oracle + Sun Strategy Update Webcast on Wed the 27th, so make sure to tune in for that. The invite was sent out yesterday, so looks like Oracle got early notice.

Simon PhippsRIP

January 21, 2010 03:54 PM GMT

The news is in that the EU has finally approved Oracle's purchase of Sun, and while there are some more hurdles to cross I think James' response is very fitting so I'll reproduce it here too.

I doubt there will be an official wake given what happened when James tried to arrange one before, so we'll need to have drinks ourselves.