New_boy

white trash computing -- where is my container

Seems like the idea of "white trash" computing is catching up like wildfire in the mainstream market.

After last years announcement about project blackbox there are at least another two vendors that came to my attention offering similar projects. 

APC and their InfrastruXure Express

and Rackable Systems with their  Concentro offering.

Although not an entirely new idea, the industry takes the old bespoke- custom only static solutions of the 90's to a new "off the shelf" idea.

Personally i do now have any experience with any of the above mentioned systems for obvious reasons. 

As Jonathan recent entry about moving a petabyte of data, i can see how this type of systems could actually make a diference for a few industries and their time to market. Imagine filming in remote parts of the world you dont have to send it back to the studio you can edit away on the spot.

The only limitation to all is that one needs to have water and power to be 100% mobile, maybe there will be "addons" in the projects where you have a water container and another two containers one containing diesel and the other diesel generators.

My favourite segment for this would be global motorsport.

Come on formula 1..

Posted at 04:20πμ Μαρ 27, 2007 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[2]

Breaking news Ian Murdock to join sun

Needles to say a good choice, although i do not know what exactly he is gonna be doing but it good to have him onboard,

Who knows maybe apt/dpkg is gonna be in solaris ( yes keith your dream will come true)

In a single line

Linux foundation, debian founder etc,etc if you have followed any opensource linux project i am sure you have bumped into his name.

Let me say welcome onboard sir,

More details from his blog

http://ianmurdock.com/2007/03/19/joining-sun/ 

Posted at 05:51μμ Μαρ 19, 2007 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[1]

SPOT aka small programmable object technology

Maybe kinda late but i bumped into this project driven by our sun labs

http://www.sunspotworld.com/

Since its friday i dont expect to get any responce back so i will satisfy my curiosity

on monday by getting more internal info if possible. 

Posted at 09:26μμ Φεβ 09, 2007 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

windows on solaris w00t? The true desktop

now how cool is this,

after the post from thinman  i just had to try it.

I got myself the latest nv build and upgraded my box, installed sunray so i can see the performance over sunray as well.

Installation is gonna finish pretty soon. Gonna do a follow up tomorow to tell how it feels.

I hope i can get rid of my windows install since i could run the necessary voip apps from within solaris.

The fact that you can now have the best of the 3 worlds on your solaris desktop is a major plus

Solaris+brandz+win4solaris just perfect!!!!!!!

 

Posted at 02:01πμ Ιαν 16, 2007 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[5]

Remote capabilities

Recently i have been working on a problem involving desktop machines.

Been remote is never easy, but i have to admit Paul and his team have made it easier than ever.

I was part of the lab team when i first started working for sun so i am aware of the capabilities but coming to the side of the user, it just perfect.

Needing special configs with various operating systems, i was able to be up and running for my tests within 1 hour.

Get the test plan, use our booking tool, use our custom jumpstart script and via the ip-kvm (they are desktops remember) install them over the network.

20 minutes later they were all ready by which time the lab team moved to do the necessary upgrades. Nice and simple, custom configs hardware and software within 1 hour been thousands miles away.

Thanks guys

Posted at 11:49πμ Ιαν 09, 2007 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  | 

Open doc... w00t? Yes open documentation, do we even need it?

I was working an escalation on an amd opteron workstation today, and while doing the basic elimination of known issues i just realised how lucky i am that i could easily access amd erratum pages.

Just go to amd.com choose product > processor > technical documentation and then revision guide
for example

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf

A nice simple pdf with all the known/public issues that amd has acknoledged,

in my case the customer was hitting erratum 154 with an incorrect diode ofset and was loging temperature events, that had already been documented in out internal bugster and the fix was already available.

That got me thinking does the big player intel have the same policy?
Tried google and the intel site and all i got was some old pentium sparse erratas, there was a collection of them on drdobs wesite as well but nothing official.

After a quick search on google i found no5 hit

http://www.sparc.com/standards/v9-errata.html

which lists more than 90 erratas for sparc v9 arch and in combination with sunsolve/opensparc.net
i found more than plenty bugs etc.

I was compelled to actually see if this is usefull information for anyone, and i realised after asking a few friends it is not. For the pure reason if you get hardware misbehaving you replace it.... I was quite amazed
how could people look for bugs/mistakes only in software when hardware/firmware could total your system.
This gave me an idea for the future to blog about techniques to investigate hardware failures.

Now the topic, since it all about openess i couch for open documentation for erratas, i have read endless stories about chipsets and bios "features" that annonyed many people.

And yes i leave myself wide open and i can see comments coming back saying you are not open etc etc.
Would be glad to hear as its good to know the other side.

Posted at 09:00πμ Δεκ 21, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Can i tune my solaris? And not only

Last night on a discussion abou having consistent settings along reboots or systems,
i realised that my friend was unaware of the importance of /etc/system file.

Without trying to reinvent the wheel and to keep this entry short, there is a very nice document called
solaris tunable parameters reference manual

And is located

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs?q=&p=doc%2F806-4015

-ip

Posted at 07:25πμ Δεκ 20, 2006 by Ioannis Psyllas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

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]

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]