The History of BigAdmin dates back to the development of a new type of installer for Solaris that would begin with the release of Solaris 8. This blog explains how BigAdmin first started. Future blogs will provide additional history and background.

Before I started working for Sun, I had been working for a company called Knight-Ridder - which was the parent company for many newspapers around the country (United States), including the San Jose Mercury News, Miami Herald, and many more.

I had also been working with Netscape and doing development with a project called 'NetCaster' at the time, which was Netscape's step into the "push" paradigm of web applications.

NetCaster utilized the proprietary dynamic HTML for Netscape 4, which was based on layers (before the current standards of divs and modern dhtml) and javascript to update the page dynamically.

At the time Netscape 4 was beautiful because it was starting to be used as a development platform - not just a browser - much like Google's Chrome us now (more on that later - Chrome is exciting stuff).

So, with Netscape 4 and NetCaster, developers could create "WebTops" - full screen pages that could be anchored to users' desktops and behave like a live desktop. They could "push" information based on the setup of the WebTop. Very cool technology at the time.

While all this work that was happening in this space, Sun was trying to modernize their installation of Solaris to be more graphic-based and more dynamic.

This eventually turned into a project called 'CD0' - a project to create a standalone installer CD that was not tied directly to the OS it was installing. The installer was based on Web Start Wizards - the Java-based installation that was developed by the Solaris Installation Team in the late 90's (1997-1999 timeframe). The team was led by Eric Nielsen and included a bunch of really talented engineers (Matt Williamson, James Falkner, Sue Sohn, John Perry, Gary Gere - just to name a few).

As part of the CD0 project and the wizard-based installation, we also built a customized kiosk - based partly on the NetCaster technology mentioned above - that would load during the installation and give the system administrator access to the web and other resources if the network was available, or local content if it was not.

We created this kiosk using Netscape 4 in chromeless mode - with multiple chromeless windows communicating with each other, and a Java applet that was the brain that would communicate with the browser using LiveConnect (the ability for a java applet to communicate directly with javascript), and update the interface dynamically. This gave the kiosk the appearance of a full application instead of a web-based application. This is similar to how "ajax" is done today - minus the applet "brain" that ran the kiosk.

This kiosk and installer was a lot of fun to work on. I loved being able to dig deep into this kind of development. Projects like this one paved the way for future web-based apps that utilized dynamic updates and communication to other resources to feed the GUI - creating a more app-like environment.

Figure 1 shows the Solaris 8 Installation Kiosk that appeared on the screen when the administrator loaded up CD0 to start the installation. Note the wizard panel on the lower right, the applet "brain" to the left (the menu itself housed the KioskControl - or the "brain") which gave all the installation notes and resources for the administrator, and the location bar at the top, which let the administrator reach external sources on the web.

Also note the small purple button below the location bar at the top of the screen. This button was the original way to reach BigAdmin - the 'bigADMIN' bar (lower case 'b' intended - as it was called originally).

As development of the installer and the kiosk progressed, we saw a need to have a central place within sun.com for the administrator to place the kiosk on if it had network access.

Based on this idea, the applet "brain" ran a test of the network to see if the user was able to ping http://www.sun.com, and if so, redirected the content window of the kiosk to point to BigAdmin.

At the time, BigAdmin had hooks into the kiosk, which allowed it to determine which version of the OS was being installed. Based on the installed OS, BigAdmin provided custom messaging and news about the latest release notes, resources, and information about that OS.

Figure 2 shows a shot of the Solaris 8 Installation Kiosk that has been landed on the original BigAdmin.

Figure 2: Solaris 8 Installation Kiosk with BigAdmin

BigAdmin was released to the public along with the Solaris 8 OS FCS - in February, 2000.

BigAdmin was inspired by the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) of the 1980's - which is where the title 'SysOp' comes from in the MOTD (Message of the Day) component at the top of today's BigAdmin homepage.

Much like the BBS systems did, BigAdmin encourages system administrators to submit their scripts and resources, as well as links to any useful content they found outside of BigAdmin. That wasy, the next sys admin looking for that sort of information would be able to find it. BigAdmin was to be a central repository for all sysadmins.

We introduced the BigAdmin Bucks program around 2001-2002, to reward users for their submissions with points that can be traded in for BigAdmin logo shirts, mugs, hats and more. This is still in effect today at the BigAdmin Bucks Page.

Soon after the initial release, BigAdmin started to become not only the landing place for the Solaris installer, but for System Administration information as a whole for Sun and Solaris users.

The Solaris Installation process that housed the Installation Kiosk as well as BigAdmin remained intact throughout the life of Solaris 8 as well as Solaris 9, but was removed with the new installation processes that were introduced with the release of Solaris 10.

A key part of BigAdmin - the Hardware Compatibility List for Solaris and OpenSolaris has continuously grown, and will soon include listings for Virtualization platforms as well. People who install Solaris and OpenSolaris can now automatically submit system information to the BigAdmin HCL, and add to the amount of systems that can run Solaris.

As BigAdmin continued to grow, more information became housed directly on the site, as opposed to only being links to other resources outside of our domain such as Feature Articles, guest writers, XPert sessions, partnerships with Solaris Documentation, and more.

BigAdmin has now grown to include the BigAdmin Newsletter, the BigAdmin Blog, the BigAdmin Wiki, as well as the BigAdmin Twitter page and the BigAdmin Facebook Fan page.

I've had a platonic love affair with the Bugatti Veyron since my younger daughter first showed it to me on the cover of Automobile Magazine a few years ago. But I mentioned it in a recent BigAdmin blog, so I had to use a different car this time. Don't want to bore you by talking about the same old $1.6 million dollar super car over and over.

Photo courtesy of http://americacars.blogspot.com/2008/09/lamborghini-murcielago-lp640-stock.html

The Lamborghini Murcielago is a great antidote for an overload of drag and drop graphical sysadmin tools. Particularly the Murcielago LP670-4 SuperVeloce or, "SV" for the sysadmin cognocenti. According to the recent review by Automobile Magazine...

"Despite its space-age looks, this is actually an old-fashioned car with an old-fashioned engine."

And at only $450,000.00 US, it is well within reach of a well-staffed IT department willing to pool its resources for 1/40th share of this magnificent machine.

At the top-secret BigAdmin track facility we recently had the opportunity to pit the SV against the BigAdmin Newsletter. In spite of our appreciation of the Lambo's mostly manual interface, we are long-time hard-core fans of the BigAdmin Newsletter. So we donned our BigAdmin caps, painted ourselves in Blue and Black (with White shadows), tatooed awk scripts up and down our arms, korn-shell around or necks, and carried these placards in hex:

42696741646d696e20576f6f2d486f6f21

It was no contest. The Lambo blew the doors off BigAdmin Newsletter by going from 0-60 in 3.2 seconds, and to 200 mph shortly thereafter, while the BigAdmin newsletter won't even get off the line until later this month.

But when it does, it'll accelerate from zero to something shy of 186,000 miles per hour with a few nano-pauses at switches and servers along the way. And it accomplishes this incredible feat with zero fluff. That's right. Our newsletter simply gives you a quick summary (with links) of all the new resources we published over the last 30 days, plus some events and outside resources we think you'd find useful.

And it arrives in ASCII text! Here's an example:

Three New Articles on Patching:
o Analyzing a patchadd or patchrm Failure in the Solaris OS
  http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/...
o How to Split a Root Mirrored With Solaris Volume Manager
  http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/...
o How to Remove a Solaris Patch While Booted From a Network
  http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/...

We only publish it about once a month, and as much as we'd like to deliver it by hand in the Lambo, we can't afford the gas. But you can subscribe for free:

It's Free. Subscribe Here!

Clearly the face-off was was just bad timing for the BigAdmin Newsletter. Unfortunately, we were unable to schedule the Lambo again due to the inability of our newsletter editor, Constance, to curb her enthusiasm for Lambo-donuts in parking lot. We are doing our best to convince Lamborghini to let us keep the SV, shredded tires and all, so we can use it as part of our BigAdmin Bucks program. We even offered to change the name to the BigAdmin Lambo Program, but we haven't received a definitive answer yet.

We'll keep you posted. Or you can ...

Subscribe to the BigAdmin Newsletter!

... and find out for yourself.

--Rick

According to family lore, my great-great-great-great maternal grandfather was Floriano Peixoto. Since my maternal grandmother, Zoila da Souza Peixoto, came to Peru via Iquitos, I suppose it's within the realm of possibility.

I think the dude kinda looks like me, too.

I would really like to verify that claim some day, but the best I can do for now is publish some Portuguese content on BigAdmin:

• Fazer Directórios Uns Dentro Dos Outros
• Making Various Directories Recursively (English translation)

This tech tip was published by Nuno Rocha on the BigAdmin wiki. It's on the BigAdmin wiki because we haven't yet put up a Portuguese tab on our multilingual hub. It only has seven tabs so far:

• Japanese
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese
• Korean
• Spanish
• French
• Italian

As soon as we have a Portuguese tab, we'll link to Nuno Rocha's content, plus any other content in Portuguese you let us know about. Vou te contar sobre isso when it happens.

Remember...

BigAdmin is your site. We'll publish any good content from Sun that we can get our hands on, but we also love to publish content that you write yourself or link to content that you find somewhere else.

Tchau,

- Rick

There you are, confident in the ability of your custom-made melon-peel helmet to protect you from harm, when all of a sudden your boss tells you to go to Community One.

Is that why you became a sysadmin - to put on a shirt and walk around a moribund conference center decorated in inoffensive colors dodging other people who would rather be on Facebook but who like you are forced to listen to clean cut hucksters in gray business suits touting the features and benefits of products that wouldn't interest you even on your best day of manufactured enthusiasm ?

Almost feels like a Tyler Durden moment, doesn't it?

I feel your pain.

I have to be there, too.

So I looked into it.

Turns out that it's relatively suck-free.

There are A LOT of tech sessions that a sysadmin can burrow into. We combed through the event program and highlighted the ones we think you would actually enjoy...

• Technical Sessions
• Deep Dives
• Hands-on Labs

As a bonus, the room will probably be dark.

Sorry we didn't include the time and location, but that sort of thing changes too much. You can see the latest agenda here:

Agenda for Technical Sessions

If you're only interested in the OpenSolaris tracks, see the ...

OpenSolaris Tracks at CommunityOne West

If you want to see the entire events calendar, you can find it on the ...

CommunityOne Page on SDN

Mischief. Mayhem. Soap. See you there.

--Rick

It's going to be interesting to combine a company that knows how to make great products with a company that knows how to make a great deal of money.

While that's going on, the BigAdmin Crew wants you to know that we're going to keep publishing and aggregating great content and resources. We are convinced that the great products coming out of the hands and minds of our feisty engineers are just as important to you as they ever were.

In fact, they may be even more important. If you search BigAdmin today for Oracle content, you'll get 204 hits (carefully go around Angelina's elbow):

Oracle Content On BigAdmin

Once inside the search results page, use the pull-down menu in the light blue box to sort the results into these categories:

• Configuration
• Database
• Developer
• General Unix
• Hardware
• Installation
• Migration
• Networking
• Performance
• Solaris
• Solaris on x86

To find out what content we'll be adding in the future, subscribe to...

The BigAdmin Newsletter!

It's loaded with how-to content and resources.

Starting in May we're switching to a text-only version to save money. We're trying to get a feel for how that whole profit-loss thing works.

If you prefer to use your RSS reader, check out...

BigAdmin's RSS Feeds!

-Rick

The "Getting Started with xVM Ops Center" (WVM-3356) course is now available for free.

Go to http://www.sun.com/training/catalog/courses/WVM-3356.xml and select Add to Shopping Cart. If you have an account on the Sun Web Learning Center, then log in and take the course. If you don't have an account, click on the "Create a New Student Account" link, create a username and password, and then take the class.

Here's the info from the course description: "For IT operations managers and systems administrators who manage rapid growth, data center consolidation, and enterprise compliance, Sun xVM Ops Center provides management tools to discover, provision, update, and manage the IT environment worldwide. This is a self-paced training that covers xVM Ops Center 2.0."

For detailed training needs, you can take the instructor-led Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0 Administration course (VM-340), a three-day hands-on course.

One of the features we've wanted on BigAdmin for a long time is the ability to comment directly on BigAdmin content. Infrastructure limitations, cost, or overhead made it difficult. This drove us half nuts because an awful lot of other sites allowed readers to post comments.

Since an awful lot of the comments were of this nature...

Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure

...we weren't too terribly upset.


That didn't stop us from wanting the capability to post comments, though. When Sun launched its wiki, we were able to hack together a comments page there. You could read an article on the BigAdmin hub, and post comments about it on the BigAdmin wiki. But it was kinda like spray painting "Francis is a Big Jerk" on the other side of town.

(No, this is not a picture of Rush Limbaugh as a young man.
I swear!)

Well, Robert finally figured out how to hack together a better solution. When you post a comment, it still lives on the wiki, but now it's fed back into the article so that it's visible for everyone to see. For example (scroll to bottom of article):

Patching a Miniroot Image on the Solaris 10 OS for x86 or SPARC Platforms, by Enda O'Connor

Check it out and tell us what you think.

- Rick

This launch introduces lots of products and features, as well as good technical information, including:

- Technical Guides for Sun Fire X2270, X4170, X4270, X4275, Sun Blade 6000 and 6048 Modular Systems
- White Papers on Reducing IT Costs Through Virtualization With Blades, and also on How to Integrate and Scale in HPC Environments

Products include:

- Versatile, flash-ready x64 rackmount servers and workstations, such as Sun Fire X2270; Sun Fire X4170, X4270, X4275 (x64 Virtualization Servers); Ultra 27 Workstation
- Sun Blade Family Enhancements: New server modules with SSD/Flash storage technology (Sun Blade X6270 and Sun Blade X6275), Sun's SSD/Flash storage, and advanced Thermal Management Solution
- Sun Network Express Module (NEM) Technology for Sun Blade Modular Systems and Servers
- Open Storage Family Enhancements (Sun J4000 Open Storage Array offers new connectivity, high-availability, performance features, while Sun x4540 Storage Server offers new processor updates)

Like I said, there's a lot here -- check it out.

Thomas Hanvey (Sun Microsystems) and Paddy Sreenivasan (Zmanda) show how to quickly configure and deploy Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, using the Sun Storage J4400 array for disk storage.

The article also explains how to configure a zpool and the ZFS file system. In this scenario, ZRM is running on a Sun Fire X4200 M2 server with the Solaris 10 8/07 OS.

For more tips on using Sun gear with Zmanda products, see these BigAdmin articles by by Thomas Hanvey (Sun Microsystems) and Dmitri Joukovski and Ken Crandall (Zmanda):

- Using Sun Fire X4540 Server With Zmanda Recovery Manager 2.2 for MySQL Database, October 2008
- Sun Storage J4400 Array as Disk Storage for Zmanda's Amanda Enterprise 2.6 Software, October 2008
- Sun Fire X4540 Server as Backup Server for Zmanda's Amanda Enterprise 2.6 Software, September 2008

And don't forget the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA (April 20-23, 2009), see mysqlconf.com.

By now you've probably heard that you can buy a Toshiba (Tecra M10 and Portege R600) laptop with OpenSolaris already installed. Models available:

• Toshiba Portege R600
• Toshiba Tecra M10

To order:

How to Buy an OpenSolaris Toshiba Laptop

For now they're only available in the US, but over the course of this year they'll become available world-wide.

If you provide support for these laptops in your organization, here are some resources to help:

• Getting Started Guide
• What's New for Users in OpenSolaris 2008.11 for Users
• What's New for Administrators in OpenSolaris 2008.11
• New storage features in OpenSolaris 2008.11
• How to Recover the OpenSolaris Software Stack

By the way, the software stack included in the Toshiba laptops is:

• Adobe Flash Player
• Glassfish V2
• Java SE Development Kit 6 Update 10
• NetBeans IDE 6.5
• OpenOffice 3.0
• Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.6
• Sun Studio Express 11/08
• Web Stack that includes MySQL and the Apache Web Server