New_boy

The name is bond, james bond

Interesting link someone shared,

http://www.accutechco.com/

You always have this feel of uncomfort when you leave home and you wish you could keep an eye back home?
For a merry 600$ you could get your sunray@anywhere laptop/surveilance package and get that feeling of
easines back in you.

MMmmm that sounded totally like a sales man 0_0

Posted at 11:00πμ Δεκ 14, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

A(nother) new user of solaris

I had my laptop with me and my young brother 17 saw my nv53 desktop with a few more tweaks here and there and for the first time he was actually interested, seen cde on my sparc box was not his cup of tea.

So i burned him a dvd with the opensolaris version and he is going to install it today lets see how that goes. A note to point before he actually got an internet connection he was not that much into computers, the combination of youtube,mp3 online stores and the explosion of greek forums have made him ask me more than regularly can this be done.

And if he likes it its gonna be for keeps cause i didnt force it on him

Posted at 08:13πμ Δεκ 13, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

If youre greek you know oddysey

Due to the fact that my pasport was running out at the end of the year, i had get a new passport.
Now my home country is part of the EU and part of the schengen agreement more info at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_treaty

What that means is that our new biometric passports are now the responsibility of the police instead of an office situated in the local prefecture HQ. So what you are going to say? Well that meant that since i am leaving in prague i was unable to just walk to the embassy and apply for my passport since it had to be relayed over to greece then to police then back to the greek office then back to the embassy then to me. And all that via 'Official mail' which happens twice a month or so. So delays were immenant.

Anyway i set out well annoyed for a quick trip to greece...

21:45 arrived prague airport checked in
22:55 ten minutes before the time of departure we get announced there are technical dificulties and plane is going to be late
23:45 actually left
02:45 landed (local time) had no luggage so walked straight out.
02:55 felt too tired to get my rental and drive the 270klm so decided to get the bus and sleep
03:15 connection bus from airport to bus station
03:48 accident in the kiffisos avenue involving a small wheel based truck, his tank leaked and spread tens litres of diesel on the street, avenue closed and worker with sand and wood powder trying to clean the street
04:00 arrived bus station 48hr national strike for some classes of workers most knew so me and some other late airport passengers stranded !!!!!!!!!!!
04:25 after much cursing and indulging in conversations with no so usual type of characters, me and two other airport stranded passengers a german and an italian guy who both relocated to my home town who i met on the bus platform we get a taxi and get cracking
05:25 we stop at a fresh accident after making sure they are allright and a doctor stopped as well
06:17 around megalopoli we have a flat tyre probably due to the debris of the accident we stopped
06:27 after the driver, me and the italian guy did a formula 1 tyre swap under rain we were back on our merry way
06:40 on the last leg of the journey on a downhill and rather snake bendy passage there is long and thick fog so we have to drop to 20klm
07:35 we are actually in the town and hit the morning traffic jams ARGHHHH!!!
07:58 i am actually home

09:20 after shower and breakfast/chat with the family ready for work.

I think i am gonna sleep for 12+ hr tonight

Posted at 12:11μμ Δεκ 12, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Personal  |  Comments[1]

New toy, v125

I had some free time and i got round playing with the v125.

Its a really nice machine at least from the pictures, since i only get to use hardware remotely.
I loaded s10u3 and i logged in through alom and it wasss wayy slow.
Time to read the product notes,

and indeed i was hitting the two bugs mentioned in the prodcut notes.

http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/html/819-7424-10/prodnotes.html#pgfId-1002207

I folowed the guidelines and i installed ALOM 1.6.2 console was just as normal nice and super fast, and i noticed
it had a nice progress bar with percentage instead of plain dots.

Another feature i saw cripping in is the asr facilityin obp. Would be quite usefull for debuging unfortunately my machine had only 2 sticks of 512mb so i could not go disable a bank

ok printenv
Variable Name Value Default Value

asr-policy normal normal

--- snip ---

ok asr-list-keys

key = usb /pci@1e,600000/@a
key = ide /pci@1e,600000/@d
key = net2&3 /pci@1d,700000/@2
key = net0&1 /pci@1f,700000/@2
key = scsi /pci@1c,600000/@2
key = hcm /pci@1c,600000/@1
key = pci2 /pci@1e,600000/@2
key = pci1 /pci@1e,600000/@3
key = pci0 /pci@1d,700000/@1
key = dimm3
key = dimm2
key = dimm1
key = dimm0

-- snip--

latest obp
ok .version
Release 4.22.17 created 2006/08/04 19:02
OBP 4.22.17 2006/08/04 19:02 Sun Fire V125
OBDIAG 4.22.17 2006/08/04 19:16
POST 4.22.17 2006/08/04 19:30

Seems really quick and snappy on the first few tests i done although its the same frequency as older models
==================================== CPUs ====================================
E$ CPU CPU
CPU Freq Size Implementation Mask Status Location
--- -------- ---------- --------------------- ----- ------ --------
0 1002 MHz 1MB SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIIi 3.4 on-line MB/P0

will continue playing and let you know.

Posted at 12:00πμ Δεκ 12, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

in need of a universal filesystem

Yesterday i got playing more and more with brandz and seems like i am going to tottaly remove the native linux install from the home network. But there is a catch 22, since linux was acting as my fileserver, i wanted to move my sharing capacity to zfs. The only way i can do it is backup my few hundered gigs to something (i knew a needed a tape device) scrap the filesystem and create a zfs raidz2. Surely there must be another way but it probably way early for me to think ( need more coffee). But got me thinking how superior it would be to have a universal file system that you could read/write natively. For example zfspool you boot your solaris do operations, boot linux and write *natively* to the same filesystem and maybe even windows. I just had this vision with our x4500, customer xy installs windows or linux and has 20TB's 10 months down the line he grows and he wants to move for whatever reason to another OS, he is locked to whatever filesystem he used before and has to go to samba/cifs ways. After the coffee if i have time i need to check the status of the zfs ports.

Posted at 09:05πμ Δεκ 11, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Skype on my solaris box and maybe more!!

I was on my solaris dekstop and i realised i wanted to call my brother but i was halfway doing something so i could not switch to linux or windows as my other pc was in bits for some other stuff. So it came to me..
BrandZ, i quickly ruzzled up a linuz zone guided from the opensolaris guide

Over at
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz/install/
which took 5 minutes.

I then went over and got the linux version from

http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/

compiled it after trying to start it got stuck.
It was time for a quick search

Bumped into darren's post

http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/skype_1.3.0.53_on_solaris_via
http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/network_automagic%2C_brandz%2C_nat_and

and jonathans

http://mumra.co.uk/index.php?/archives/83-What-a-shame,-no-Solaristm-port-for-Skypetm.html

After getting

ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/lib/alsa-lib-1.0.13.tar.bz2

compiled it and it worked like a charm.

Winner!!!!

After xmas if i get get my encoding from a minidv camera going to the brandz i would kiss my linux install goodbye,
maybe its time to add to the xmas list a new graphics card for the solaris box and try unreal tournament.
That would be wayy cool....

Although a bit late with my brandz the future seems bright.

Posted at 11:53πμ Δεκ 10, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

My airline got canceled

My friend was flying yesterday from cyprus to the uk, upon arrival on the airport the passengers received a letter saying something along the lines "we regret to inform you that the past 3 months our company was facing difficulties and we filed for bankrupcy". I asked to get a copy of the letter if possible. My comment on it is, there are not many people who can brag that they went to the airport and the airline was canceled!!!!!!!

Posted at 03:19πμ Δεκ 10, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Personal  |  Comments[1]

A new begining

It time for me to start a blog, i still have not decided about the content but it would be about what i do which is dealing with hardware. For our new financial year who just started we already have announceed some new toys. So in the following weeks i should blog about them and other interesting things i am doing.

Posted at 01:38πμ Αυγ 02, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Personal  |  Comments[0]