Planet Solaris
February 08, 2010
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Good to see SourceForge being responsive here and deciding to take this risk. The draconian US export laws do leave US corporations in an invidious position, even outside their own borders, and it's easy for managers to decide to play it safe at the expense of freedom and transparency.
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I hope there is more to this than there appears. I'll try to investigate.
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"Google shows no sign of working to get their code upstream anymore." -- Serious break-down of trust here, as seemingly the fusion of pragmatism and secrecy at Google is leading them to treat their community responsibilities as a low priority. We'll see much more of this from corporate FOSS users in the future, which is why I'm convinced we need to grade projects on more than just their license choice (or the warmness towards the FOSS communities of their out-of-band programmes).
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Good to see the Washington Post tackling ACTA and attempting to explain its provisions to the general reader. Still far to complex for everyman, but the seeds are there (like explaining that all the three-strikes legislation is advance preparation by national governments so that ACTA ratification is easier when it happens).
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While you can't take anything dangerous on to a plane in the US, you can certainly buy very worrying stuff in the on-board catalogue. This, for example, is a USB stick containing a rootkit and activity monitor. I note it doesn't work on a Mac.
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.
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
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Mark Pilgrim with a eulogy for the freedom to tinker. This is one of the key reasons I'm an advocate of and activist for software freedom.
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It is, of course, the more educated choice.
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Spun out to its own site, this project (a virtual machine kernel written in Javascript) is absolutely fascinating and deserves wider investigation.
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It's FOSDEM weekend, so maybe it's time this shirt made a comeback.
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Some good news on internet rights from Australia for a change. This case establishes that common-carrier status does indeed apply to Australian ISPs. Hopefully this starts setting a precedent that will push back on thre-strikes regulations.
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Useful voice-of-experience post by Nat.
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
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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Disturbing but great post explaining how the license terms MPEG-LA force their H.264 (and MPEG-2/4) licensees to pass on in their sublicenses basically give you no useful rights to the 900 patents. This ridiculous situation has to end. No amount of "pragmatism" can excuse giving a patent pool cartel such power to shake down the whole connected population.
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Joy of Tech with a much more convincing hype cycle explanation than that tired analyst curve diagram.
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It's not necessarily cause-and-effect, though. Unless you're reading about H.264 patents and licensing.
February 03, 2010
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
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:
- A roadmap for enterprise Solaris customers
- Guarantees with regard to the well-being and sustained viability of OpenSolaris as an Open Source community (independent of "OpenSolaris" as a distribution)
- Future support and development for Solaris virtualization technologies, namely xVM (the best Xen solution in the industry thanks to ZFS, Crossbow, FMA, etc.) and Containers (the best Xen alternative in the industry), with respect to how they will compliment, supplement or be replaced by "Oracle VM"
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
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
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:
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?
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
There were two sessions (beginners/advanced) at the monthly Tokyo OpenSolaris
Study Group on Saturday:
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!! :-)
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A long, must-read article that draws lessons from previous experiences (with GIF and MP3) to explain why anyone with concerns for liberty should discourage use of H.264 and promote alternatives. The link below is to a letter where the licensing company for H.264 even explains that they are using the drug-dealer model to minimise consumer fears via no-cost licensing while threatening implementors with aggressive legal action. I'm still 100% in agreement with Mozilla on this one.
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Pretty good synopsis of the interview I gave, which ironically appears to be locked up behind a paywall.
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If you are in any doubt that H.264 cannot be implemented legally as open source, take a look at this letter from MPEG-LA.
January 29, 2010
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?
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.
- Charles Phillips: Welcome and Oracle + Sun: Transforming the Industry
- John Fowler: Hardware Strategy
- Thomas Kurian: Software Strategy
- Edward Screven: Operating Systems and Virtualization
- Juergen Rottler: Customer Service and Support Strategy
- Jeff Epstein: Operational Strategy
- Larry Ellison: Oracle + 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.
Oracle
articulates the new strategy of Oracle+Sun.
Webcast.
Release.
Final.
Presos.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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To summarise: MySQL was always Free software, always had these problems (some would say never open source in spirit) yet still thrived at the heart of the FOSS movement, so why should this transition prove any different.
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This is the way the world ends /
Not with a bang but a whimper.
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
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Excellent start to an explanation of Mozilla's position on H.264 and patent-encumbered CODECs. Still plenty of remaining questions, which will hopefully be addressed in part two of this explanation. Personally I think Mozilla is picking the right path and I hope we'll see Google (owner of YouTube) backing them in their promotion of technologies anyone in any country can use freely (rather than H.264 which is deviously chained to corporate profit).
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Tim Bray joins the growing number of writers dangerously circling in politically-correct shark-infested waters looking for the core truth explaining the low numbers of women in the technology industry. Personally I think we make a mistake to look just at gender for an explanation. I think there are plenty of men put off the technology industry too, for the same reasons as many women.
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Great feature on Neil Gaiman in the New Yorker.
-
Details (in Portuguese) of the event I'm attending in Brazil this week.
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.)
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
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.
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The issue at stake here is what some call "common-carrier status" for networks. Regardless of the excuse - be it China's hatred of protest, Italy's hatred of pædophiles or the USA's hatred of music lovers - governments should be protecting it. Once the principle has been breached, it is a slippery slope to a corporate-controlled society, whether the corporation is question is the state, the RIAA or, indeed, Google or Microsoft.
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Tone-deaf editorial by the Chinese government coruscates Clinton & Google while actually casting light on the paranoia that makes China censor its citizens and force them to live by rumour.
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If you were still in any doubt about it, this interview should prove that RMS does not live in your world. To go beyond the interview, a comment elsewhere points out he does not use web browsers; rather, he e-mails web URLs to a server that sends back the text for him to read in EMACS. Amazingly and inspiringly consistent philosophy and values over time, yes, but increasingly disjoint from the reality the rest of us have to navigate.
January 24, 2010
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Schneier points out that the feature China hacked in GMail was only there because the US government demanded it "for security", and that building trapdoors for use by spooks is an invitation for bad guys to hack them. They are another example of why security through obscurity is an anti-pattern.
Another question this raises is whether Google's position is truly defensible. They say they will only obey Chinese law if the Chinese government does too. Does the same apply to other governments? What about US government use of the same trapdoor?
To criticise here is not to defend China's execrable record on human rights. Rather, it is to note that China defends itself internationally by saying it is just doing publicly what other governments do secretly (while overlooking the fact its own use is usually tyrannous). Once again that defense is theirs.
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Excellent explanation of why Firefox has no H.264 support and why it won't be getting any. This is exactly the right position to be taking and I think it's a crying shame that major traffic drivers like YouTube aren't taking the same approach. [Is there also some rule that demands that the better the article, the more stupid the comments?]
January 23, 2010
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:
| Compression | Size |
|---|
| Application | 1.2G |
| ZFS default | 1.4G |
| ZFS gzip-1 | 920M |
| ZFS gzip-9 | 939M |
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:
| Compression | Size |
|---|
| Application | 4.9G |
| ZFS default | 2.8G |
| ZFS gzip-1 | 1.8G |
| ZFS gzip-9 | 1.8G |
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.
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.
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.
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.
January 22, 2010
Chris
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.
Added a few shots of a few sections of
Tokyo
Tower the other night ...
I like this old tower much better than
the new one being built, but I suppose life moves on.
January 21, 2010
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.
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.
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