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Wednesday July 28, 2004
/. slashdotted?
Not that you would ever read about this on slashdot.
Screenshot
(2004-07-28 09:15:47.0)
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Monday July 26, 2004
Kit of much newness.....
sun.com cover story is on our new amd64 based workstations and servers. My personal favourite is the new v40z, these things scream along.
(2004-07-26 11:51:25.0)
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Friday July 23, 2004
blogs & new Solaris features
So I spent some time today talking to one of the Oracle Certification Environment folks who we are doing some work with at the moment, and following on from the conversation I sent her a bunch of blog links etc. that I reckon are of interest, and I figured lets stick up this list here as well. So here goes (slightly edited and one or two new entries).
Blogs of interest (and why)
And of course the new entries
And I mentioned a few other things.
And of course if you want to play with any of these cool new technologies, after you've read all the blogs, you can always download Solaris Express.
(2004-07-23 10:43:47.0)
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Make Air Not War......
So where to start on this one. The funniest event that was happening in Dublin last night was the final of the Irish Air Guitar Championships followed by The Warlords of Pez. What can I say, some classic moments of the must extravagant bedroom strutting air guitar that you have ever seen. All credit goes to the winner, Smell Gibson with his amazing solo riffs to the Trashing of The Christ (no idea..) and Deep Purples riff filled classic Smoke on the Water (although I'm sure the guitar tab is not needed).
More journalistic write ups can be found here and here.
Apparently the world finals are on in Finland in a few weeks time. I'm almost tempted ;). If you ever get a chance to go to one of these events give it a shot, funniest evening you will have in a long time.
(2004-07-23 07:28:07.0)
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Wednesday July 21, 2004
Petes Live Upgrade Script
So Pete Shanahan has saved me the hassle of writing a live upgrade script, take a look at his entry here.
(2004-07-21 06:09:09.0)
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Tuesday July 20, 2004
dtrace mibs...
Jon Haslam has a nice blog entry on the new mib provider in dtrace. Worth a look.
(2004-07-20 07:07:25.0)
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Live Upgrade
So after years of just jumpstarting my machine on my way out of the office when a new build comes out I decided to bite the bullet and play around with Live Upgrade. So what is Live Upgrade I hear you ask, to put it simply its a method of upgrading your system while your system is still running, and as such minimising downtime.
Basically make sure you have a partition/disk available thats the same size as your root disk, and as root call /usr/sbin/lu and follow the menu options to first create and then upgrade an alternative boot partition. Finally you just activate the boot env and [updated] init 6 [/update] (don't use reboot, the new partition won't be picked up).
Of course all of this can be scripted as well, next experiment ;).
(2004-07-20 04:19:53.0)
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Monday July 19, 2004
Profiling Perl
Very interesting article on Profiling Perl over at perl.com. Well worth a read.
(2004-07-19 05:25:47.0)
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Wednesday July 14, 2004
Solaris Express 7/04
Solaris Express 7/04 is out later on today, go get it.
Alan Hargreaves & Alan Coppersmith have listed most of the nice new features that have been added. Adam Leventhal also has a list of new dtrace features.
(2004-07-14 02:21:41.0)
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Tuesday July 13, 2004
a quick look at the bge interface
One of the more ubiquitous network interfaces on new Sun boxes is bge (Driver for Broadcom BCM570x), which in mind is quite a cute piece of kit. Bge comes on boxes such as the v20z, v440 etc, and is supported on a bunch of others.
Anyway, enough pitch, lets take a look at the nic.
kstat & bge
As is standard for all devices in solaris there is a multitude of kstat information available on bge. A quick count gives us
#kstat -m bge | sed -e "/^module/d" -e "/^name/d" -e "/^$/d" | wc -l
250
Quite a few, I'd guess more than you ever want to know about the interface to be honest. (If you are interested in looking at what this looks like, kstat -m bge output can be viewed here).
In general you are only going to be interested in the output of kstat -m bge -n bge{instance no}, so in the case of my desktop box this is instance 0.
# kstat -m bge -n bge0
module: bge instance: 0
name: bge0 class: net
align_errors 0
blocked 0
brdcstrcv 81101
brdcstxmt 33
carrier_errors 0
collisions 135695
crtime 134.109406862
defer_xmts 29952
duplex half
ex_collisions 3
fcs_errors 0
first_collisions 76907
ierrors 176
ifspeed 100000000
intr 962033
ipackets 924438
ipackets64 924438
macrcv_errors 0
macxmt_errors 0
media twpair
missed 0
multi_collisions 22003
multircv 236
multixmt 3
norcvbuf 0
noxmtbuf 0
obytes 403032503
obytes64 403032503
oerrors 0
oflo 0
opackets 884859
opackets64 884859
promisc off
rbytes 713392398
rbytes64 713392398
rcv_badinterp 0
runt_errors 0
snaptime 30973.478577695
sqe_errors 0
toolong_errors 0
tx_late_collisions 0
uflo 0
unknowns 6154
xmt_badinterp 0
xmtretry 0
These stats are actually exported from the generic lan driver (gld) which bge uses. gld's manpage contains most of the info that you might want to look at about what each of these options mean.
bge configuration
bge can be configured via ndd or by setting parameters in /platform/platform-name/kernel/drv/bge.conf. The driver is auto negotiating and self tuning, so the only things that you may need to fiddle around with are your link speed and mode, but even this is unlikely. The various options for this are documented in the bge manpage.
(2004-07-13 10:54:35.0)
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Monday July 12, 2004
Shiny, shiny boots of shiny....
... okay not quite boots of shiny leather [1], but nice none the less. Got a new toy set up today. I've moved from my trusty old Ultra 30 to a nice new shiny amd64 box,
# psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 07/12/2004 10:11:19
on-line since 07/12/2004 09:58:32.
The i386 processor operates at 2191 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 1 as of: 07/12/2004 10:11:19
on-line since 07/12/2004 09:58:34.
The i386 processor operates at 2191 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
# prtconf | head -4
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems i86pc
Memory size: 2048 Megabytes
System Peripherals (Software Nodes):
# ifconfig -a
lo0: flags=1000849 mtu 8232 index 1
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000
bge0: flags=1004843 mtu 1500 index 2
inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask ffffff00 broadcast xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
And of course its running Solaris 10 ;). Escapades and adventures in x86 desktop land to be listed.........
[1] http://www.velvetunderground.com/
(2004-07-12 10:17:22.0)
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Friday July 09, 2004
El Reg on Dtrace
So El Reg has a nice article on Dtrace. And apparently Bryan Cantrill explodes ;). On the other hand having seen Bryan give a presentation before, he is, how do we say it, energetic.
[update]
And apparently dtrace is on slashdot
again. So before the shouts of port it, port it start, I'd recommend you read The De-commoditization of the OS.
(2004-07-09 03:15:27.0)
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Wednesday July 07, 2004
AIB & JDS
So its been covered by a bunch of folks already (Calum, Ghee, etc), but I figured I'd mention the JDS in Allied Irish Banks deal that was recently announced. Seeing as a bunch of the folks who work on JDS work in the same building as me I have to say, in an age old Irish way, nice one!
It might even tempt me to change my account over ;).
(2004-07-07 09:49:14.0)
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