Wednesday August 08, 2007
Wednesday August 08, 2007 While I was on vacation last week, the following email was sent to the OpenSolaris discuss alias (posted here with permission of the author):
-
Subject: Solaris "thinks" that my standalone desktop is a huge network....
By "standalone" I mean a computer that is not part of a LAN, not even on a peer-peer connection, but one that gets on to the Internet.
I have a desktop with Sun Solaris and I have this problem. Solaris thinks that my standalone desktop is a huge network with a thousand users or more. I need to figure out a way of making Solaris understand that I am the only person using this compuer which is all alone, by itself.
I name is Shiva, and I want to tell my computer that it is my computer. It is ok for me if it allows another person called "root" who I figure out is a someone who is knowledgeable enough to get down to the root of the computer, it is not going to be me, it would be the support professional who would at some point of time visit me to look into my computer. But who is nobody? who is nouser? who is guest? What are groups? Why does Solaris say that I don't have the rights and privileges to access my DVD drive?
Why does Solaris wait for the root user to log in to shut down my computer ? I can log out as Shiva, but I don't see the controls to shut down. So, I phone up support to come in and log in as root and shut down my machine every afternoon, evening and at night and in the middle of the night.
And Solaris doesn't say yes immediately. It agrees to shut down, not until allowing 60 seconds to all other users who do not exist, after it sends out a "broadcast" announcing the "system" shut down, while I wait with my eyes fixed on the monitor on the messages that flash by in commnad prompt which I can't figure out, until Solaris finally shuts down...
Solaris thinks that my computer is a huge network, so offers me plenty of functalities that I am not going to need nor understand.
Solairs is elaborate, very elaborate and robust, but my computer stands alone. What do I need to tell Solaris to offer me just what I need and no more ?
What components are needed and what need to be stripped ? If my computer is a standalone ?
When I saw the subject, I was thinking, what the heck is this person talking about? When I read it, I was just dying with laughter. I was just amazed. It was so funny, and so right on. This is probably one of the best emails I have seen on that alias in months. I was sitting next to my husband and just going on about how great this email is. Really, it should be on the approachability alias. It just perfectly encapsulates some of the key issues with Solaris and OpenSolaris.
Then, I read the replies. Oh man, I could not believe it. WOOSH! That was the sound of this email going right over their heads. Not just a few people, no, *every* one of them just did not get it. I was thinking, oh no way, how could they take this email seriously?? People were trying to "educate" the imaginary Shiva on what root is and how they hoped there was some competent admin there running his system for him. Some were angry that Shiva was not interested in learning how to be a Solaris expert but just wanted to use his machine like a dumb Windows box. It was just sad really.
Come on! Would anyone who knows that little about unix and/or linux be on the OpenSolaris discuss alias?
Is it any wonder that OpenSolaris and Solaris aren't your mother's unixes? Nope, because we don't get it. We write code that makes it do what we, the unix geeks, want. We have no clue what many of our customers want. We want to expand our market share. How many geeks like us do we think are out there? We have no prayer of breaking into Windows' market share, or make a significant dent in OS X, because most of the people using computers out there are like Shiva, not like us. OS X has proven you can be UNIX and still be totally functional for all the Shivas out there. My parents both use OS X. They couldn't tell you how to get a command prompt or what root is but they can make their computers do everything they need them to. They can get them to do more than I can get my Solaris 10 desktop (working as a desktop, not a server) to do, and I am supposed to be an expert.
All the folks on OpenSolaris discuss wanted to do was just make Shiva go away. They wanted to tell him why he was wrong (or uneducated, or both), Solaris was right, and "teach" him how to use his computer our way. Don't get me wrong here. Solaris is great. If I was setting up a server, I wouldn't choose anything else. It is absolutely the best OS for that market. As a desktop, it is not there and it never will be until we get it.
Maybe we need to take a few refreshers on requirements gathering (and also on HCI).
Friday August 04, 2006 I work from home full-time. I love it. I have been working from home for 5 years now, longer than most people. About the time I started working from home, Sun started this great program called "iWork" which is all about flexible work spaces. On the whole it is a great program but sometimes it seems like they still don't quite get it.
Today's example:
I got an email today about an iWork forum for "home assigned" employees in the and those considering becoming "home assigned". Further down in the email it says, "Please note that this is an in-person session only." The forum will not even be able to take call-ins.
Um, hmm.
Monday April 24, 2006 So... in light of today's news... I bring you quotes from Spaceballs (which are eerily relevant)...
Yogurt: I am the keeper of a greater power, a power known throughout the universe as the...
Barf: ...the Force?
Yogurt: No, the Schwartz!
Yogurt: Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs-the T-shirt, Spaceballs-the Coloring Book, Spaceballs-the Lunch box, Spaceballs-the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs-the Flame Thrower.
[turns it on]
Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink: Ooooh!
Yogurt: [reacts to dinks] The kids love this one.
[a dink hands him a doll that looks likes Yogurt]
Yogurt: And last but not least, Spaceballs the doll, me.
[pulls string]
Doll: May the schwartz be with you!
Yogurt: [kisses the doll] Adorable.
Lone Starr: I still don't understand how I'm going to lift that big statue with this little ring.
Yogurt: Never underestimate the power of the Schwartz!
Lone Starr: Listen! We're not just doing this for money... We're doing it for a SH*T LOAD of money!
[upon going into "ludicrous speed"]
Dark Helmet: My brains are going into my feet!
Dark Helmet: WHAT? You went over my helmet?
President Skroob: Sandurz, Sandurz. You got to help me. I don't know what to do. I can't make decisions. I'm a president!
Dark Helmet: No, it's not what you think. It's much, much worse!
President Skroob: As president of Planet Spaceball, I can assure both you and your viewers that there's absolutely no air shortage whatsoever. Yes, of course. I've heard the same rumor myself. Yes, thanks for calling and not reversing the charges. Bye-bye.
[hangs up]
President Skroob: Sh*thead.
Dark Helmet: You have the ring, and I see your Schwartz is as big as mine. Let's see how well you handle it.
Dark Helmet: Sh*t! I hate it when I get my Schwartz twisted.
Friday March 24, 2006 Remember when you were in college and you were working on your senior project or even a class project and you had to make the decision, do it all at home (with your crappy internet connection, less powerful machine, etc) or do it on a machine at school and beg the admin to set up all the special things you needed (and be told no most of the time and when they did say yes, wait a week for it to happen)? Ok, maybe you were in college in the days when you couldn't do things at home (poor punch card folks, my condolences) so for you the problem was worse, you were totally at the mercy of the people running the machines.
My university has finally solved the problem, with zones. Of course this would be just a few months before I graduate and after I am done with all of this type of work, but I am excited for the rest of the students. Now students have complete control over their (virtual) machine plus they get all the benefits of using a machine in the lab. If only we'd had this when I did my senior project (ok, I *was* the admin then so it was not too bad).
One student is logging his experience, called The Bunsen Project. It looks as if he broke php already (3/27/03 - it has been fixed) but here were his first two entries after getting the zone:
- Virtual Machine - March 6
Today I got the virtual machine from the CSL. With this, I will be able to set up a MySQL account so that I can put my project online, instead of having to resort to static box. More importantly, however, I will be able to have full administrative access to the server which will be great practice.
Server Installs - March 9
Well, it took several hours, but I made lots of progress today with the server. I was able to install several essential programs using the 'pkg-get' program from blastwave.org. Here are some of the programs I installed:
I decided to compile and install the apache server from scratch because I figured I could get more out of it. Because of this, I've run in to some problems and my server is still not up yet :(
Doing this isn't just nice for the students, it makes the admin's life so much easier too. Now when a student or instructor needs to set up a project, he can just hand them a zone and let them go. Oh, I wish we'd had this when I worked as an admin there...
Thursday March 16, 2006 I wanted to let you all know about a really exciting new software engineering conference coming this year.
Waterfall 2006 will be held in New York state in April 2006.
Some of the paper authors include: K. Schwaber, J. Highsmith, R. Martin, S. Ambler, and K. Beck.
Check it out!
(I have not mentioned it here before, I am a big fan of agile development... you'll get to read more about my work in this area later.)
Thursday January 05, 2006 Tom: well a whole classroom full of people running JDS on the sunrays pretty much kills them
Kristin: oh bummer
Tom: ran the memory right out
Kristin: wow
Tom: the systems spend too much time paging
Tom: cde and they run fine
Kristin: hmm
Tom: it sucked
Tom: we had to get everyone in JDS to log out and log back in
Tom: I'm not a big fan of sunrays today
Kristin: what is the sunray server?
Tom: there are 2 v240's
Kristin: those are new arent they?
Tom: yes
Kristin: and how many sunrays in the lab?
Tom: 32
Top on one of the servers:
last pid: 8832; load averages: 6.64, 7.17, 4.44
15:23:41
496 processes: 475 sleeping, 15 running, 3 zombie, 3 on cpu
CPU states: 11.8% idle, 66.9% user, 21.3% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% swap
Memory: 2048M real, 39M free, 3553M swap in use, 1973M swap free
Tom: PID USERNAME LWP PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME CPU COMMAND
8798 fffffff 15 47 0 128M 53M run 0:03 5.12% java
8658 aaaa 8 52 0 113M 66M sleep 0:05 4.52% mozilla-bin
5563 fffffff 1 21 0 80M 35M cpu/0 0:09 3.69% Xsun
8828 fffffff 15 1 0 146M 44M run 0:01 3.67% java
4024 aaaa 1 53 0 84M 30M sleep 0:13 3.15% Xsun
7624 qqqqqqqq 8 59 0 110M 45M run 0:07 2.07% mozilla-bin
26536 oooooooo 3 24 0 122M 63M run 0:44 2.03% mozilla-bin
26362 mmmmmmmm 1 51 0 36M 28M sleep 0:05 1.86% Xsun
25426 oooooooo 1 59 0 97M 39M sleep 0:36 1.85% Xsun
24654 qqqqqqqq 1 30 0 41M 30M sleep 0:13 1.32% Xsun
8225 fffffff 19 59 0 149M 41M sleep 0:04 1.22% java
20619 cccccccc 1 43 0 76M 27M sleep 0:10 1.15% Xsun
7329 fffffff 1 53 0 64M 32M cpu/0 0:01 0.91% metacity
6838 ggggg 19 58 0 144M 36M sleep 0:05 0.87% java
3824 sssss 19 56 0 149M 39M run 0:09 0.81% java
5226 aaaa 19 47 0 149M 39M sleep 0:07 0.70% java
2083 wwwwww 19 59 0 144M 39M run 0:09 0.69% java
vmstat output:
kthr memory page disk faults cpu r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr m0 m1 m2 m1 in sy cs us sy id 0 0 0 687760 977984 3 21 4 2 3 0 20 1 1 1 0 366 737 553 0 1 99 13 0 1 3148808 60592 921 7577 2580 0 0 0 0 225 113 114 18 2850 22816 5966 70 30 0 10 0 1 3254736 151744 1062 6150 4451 8 8 0 0 115 59 57 441 3456 19750 3917 67 33 0 24 0 1 3256128 159080 760 5836 1204 0 0 0 0 107 54 54 17 1531 20498 3289 78 22 0 7 0 1 3248296 147712 869 9398 982 0 0 0 0 95 49 49 19 1786 18958 3722 69 31 0
So, they are getting more RAM and hoping that will make things better. People were not happy to be told they have to run CDE until further notice. It is things like this that are not going to leave the students with a good impression of Solaris and Sun hardware.
I like the idea behind the Sunray. Tom tells me they are really easy to admin. I like the fact that I can stick my little card into one and get all my stuff just like I left it. Someday I want to do that on any computer, anywhere. But, if we're going to get to that point, then we, the developers, need to get out of the "it runs fine on my desktop" mindset.
I had never really considered the memory usage of JDS compared to CDE before. As soon as he told me about this, I had to go find out some more information. The first web page I came across was a fellow Sun blogger, John Rice. He had been following the initial tweaking of Gnome 2.0 and wanted to see how the memory usage was now. He determined that JDS was using around 35M of private and 45M of shared memory. Looking at the top output from the Sunray server, that seems reasonable. Each of those Xsun instances is using anywhere from 36MB to 97MB, with most in the 70-90MB range, with 30MB or so more reserved. John believes that all this memory usage in JDS is because its init functions are pulling in every library under the Sun.
I started peeking at other web pages and found another interesting discussion at osnews.com. It says:
- "We received reports that GNOME was orders of magnitude slower than CDE on Sun Rays. To verify and measure this, I designed and ran some performance tests in order to compare the time and bandwidth usage of GNOME (JDS) with that of CDE on Sun Rays. The tests measure the time it takes to display data using various desktop applications: Browser, StarOffice and Terminal."
This is another Sun person, Johan Steyn. He basically uses tcpdump to count bytes sent between the Sunray and the server. What I found as interesting were some of the comments such as "That's why you run CDE on your old SPARCstations, and Gnome/JDS on your dual-AMD64 boxen." and "Personally its very close to being a perfect environment for me. i would like better fast user switching. I don't think it is bloated. its rare that my system ever goes to the page file." It's rare that his system has to page? If a desktop system might be taxed enough by JDS to start paging, does that mean we expect Sunray server supporting 15 Sunrays to be at least, if not more, powerful than 15X a current desktop? I think expecting our customers to buy a couple of T2000's (at $16k-26k a piece) to support a lab of 32 Sunrays might be a bit unreasonable.
It is not just Gnome using up memory. Looking at the top output, java and mozilla are using up even more memory. I took a peek at my own system, running Solaris Express s10_52 (yea I know, I need to upgrade... in my copious spare time). From my system I see:
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME CPU COMMAND 355 kristin 1 49 0 63M 58M sleep 8:17 0.59% Xsun 1320 kristin 6 59 0 75M 63M sleep 2:22 0.51% mozilla-bin 511 kristin 1 49 0 16M 10M sleep 0:14 0.09% gnome-terminal 497 kristin 1 59 0 56M 8352K sleep 1:24 0.07% metacity 501 kristin 1 59 0 62M 13M sleep 8:44 0.05% gnome-panel 495 kristin 1 59 0 3720K 2016K sleep 0:26 0.01% gnome-smproxy 503 kristin 4 59 0 71M 20M sleep 0:04 0.01% nautilus 505 kristin 1 59 0 54M 5960K sleep 0:27 0.00% galf-server 479 kristin 1 59 0 10M 7488K sleep 0:00 0.00% gconfd-2 362 root 7 59 0 2640K 1448K sleep 1:22 0.00% mibiisa 576 root 2 49 0 4456K 2480K sleep 0:39 0.00% automountd 693 kristin 13 39 10 99M 67M sleep 0:24 0.00% java 456 kristin 1 59 0 1880K 592K sleep 0:15 0.00% dsdm 65 root 7 59 0 3464K 184K sleep 0:13 0.00% picld 481 kristin 1 59 0 4960K 2848K sleep 0:03 0.00% xscreensaver
Xsun is using about the same but my mozilla, which has been running all day and is also running my email, is using almost half the memory as the mozillas on Tom's Sunrays. My java, which is 1.5, is using significantly less memory as well. Tom testing running mozilla again on the Sunray server for me and at startup it was using 98Mb, after loading 4 web pages it was at 104MB. Just adding up the memory (RES column) on my system by me (and ignoring numbers under 1MB), I get 231 MB. Imagine that multiplied by 32 users, and we have 7392 MB. Maybe only 1/3 of that is private, that is about what John Rice found, then we have 2464 MB just in private memory needed for the 32 users (I sure hope my math is just wrong). I can see why 4GB across his two servers might not be enough memory. Let's hope no one launches StarOffice.
All of this goes back to what I said at the beginning. I am sure the developers for each of these applications look at the memory usage (I sure hope they look!) and think, 100MB, that is not a big deal. Alone, it is not. Added with every other 100MB application people run just to have a minimally functioning desktop (web broswer, email, file browser) and then adding in common tools like a word processor or IM client and it starts to add up.
So, how many Sunrays should we expect a server to support? According to an article on unixville.com "The recommended server configuration for an average office with 50 active Sun Ray appliances is a Sun E250 with dual processors, 1 Gig of RAM, dual 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet controllers, and two disks to spread the swap space onto.". 50 users and 1 GB of RAM? Not if we want them to run JDS. Okay, the article is 1 1/2 years old, but has the memory usage really changed that much in 1 1/2 years? My build, s10_52 is from Feb 2004, before that article and an E250 with 1GB could not come close to supporting 50 Sunrays running Gnome + Mozilla + Java.
What is my point? There is a major disconnect between the folks considering the system requirements for applications such as Gnome and the Sunray technology, or really any thin client. I don't want to see Sunrays left behind with CDE. Can JDS be changed to use less memory? A lot of JDS fans like what the "bloat" provides them; anti-aliased fonts, pretty graphics, lots of functionality. JDS is certainly not the only GUI suffering from memory hog syndrome. OS X is a major memory hog, but it sure is pretty. What is the solution? Well, I guess step one is get more memory for those Sunray servers. I think the long term solution is for developers to stop using memory just because and start being smart about it. Yea, an individual machine may have 1 GB of memory to use, but we have to remember these applications are used other places besides our dual opteron desktop boxes. Customer feedback, its is where its at... you can't get enough.
Wednesday December 14, 2005 Grumpy Sysadmin
Ingredients:
- 1 Solaris sysadmin
- 2 Solaris 10 sunray servers
- 1 Solaris Fingerprint Database, not up-to-date
- 1 Web Designer who doesn't know basic HCI principles
1. Have web designer add a date stamp to the fingerprint database web page in a format that is hard to read and easy to miss.
2. Have sysadmin enter servers' md5 signatures on web-based Solaris Fingerprint Database.
3. Allow sysadmin temperature to rise as he begins to believe his machines have been rooted when he sees they do not match the fingerprint database.
4. Mix well.
5. Allow to stew for 48 hours.
You will know it is done when the sysadmin realizes the date for the fingerprint database is over a month old and does not include the latest S10 kernel patches and that he's wasted the last 2 days trying to figure out how he was rooted and then reinstalling the servers.
Serve chilled. Makes great leftovers.
Tuesday December 13, 2005 I never thought I'd find myself saying, "Darn, if only I didn't work at Sun", but I just did. What could cause me to say such a thing about the job I love so? I am ineligible to enter the Solaris 10 University Challenge Contest.
No, I am not pushing this just because I work here. I really think this is cool. As soon as I heard we were doing this, I was thinking about entering my own thesis. When I got home that day, I told Tom he should enter his thesis. Unfortunately for him, he is ineligible too. We were both pretty disappointed we could not enter.
What is so great about this contest? To graduate, you have to do a senior project or a thesis. If you're like me, you are going to spend a good amount of your time on it (6 months on my senior project, 18 months on my thesis). At the end you'll have that piece of paper to hang on the wall, but why stop there? How about $5,000 and an Ultra 20 Workstation? How about also getting $100,000 in free Sun products for your school? All of this for something you're going to be doing anyway. Check out the rules and then get your project submitted by 6/10/06.
For now, my dreams of the Kristin Amundsen Software Engineering Lab will once again have to go on hold. Maybe I'll win the lottery... I guess I have to play to win. So do you, and I think odds are much better for the S10 University Challenge.
Friday December 09, 2005 So, one of the problems Tom encounters when he makes changes to the systems at FooU is old instructors. By old, I don't necessarily mean age, but out of the industry and in education for a long time. These instructors, as expert as they may be in their niche of computer science, don't understand a lot of the changes in the industry. I don't have any "proof" of this other than my own (and a few other's) observations. It seems to me they just don't see the big picture anymore.
One story he told me, which I don't have in an IM chat log, was a conversation with one instructor shortly after the change this summer to universal home directories for all unix systems in the department. Until last summer, every person had a seperate account and home directory on each server in the department. Some systems did point to the main department server, a Solaris box, just for usernames and passwords, but the accounts were seperate. This instructor noticed that a file he'd created while on one of the Linux servers was in his account on the main Solaris server as well. Tom tried to say, "Yes, they are the same account now," but he was not getting it. He knew the passwords were shared, but he just was not hearing that now the actual account, files and all, were the same on Linux and Solaris. He did finally get it.
Here's another one that just happened today:
Tom: (Instructor X) thinks centralized home directories is "a step backwards"
Kristin: backwards???
Kristin: how does he figure that?
Tom: back to the days of centralized servers he says
Tom: I don't know
Tom: can't make everyone happy
Kristin: well in a sense he is right
Kristin: but i think that is the way computers are kind of going now
Kristin: we're moving away from all the keep everything on your personal computer model back to a model where the physical machine is almost irrelevant
Tom: yes
Kristin: i think that is a good thing
Kristin: someday i want to have it where i can sit down at any computer anywhere and do anything
Kristin: have all my data
Kristin: already my email is like that
Kristin: tell him the network is the computer
Tom: :)
Tom: not for some people
Kristin: aparantly not
Kristin: did he really like it better when he had N accounts on N systems and all his files spread across them using ftp to get some file onto the machine he needs it on all the time?
Tom: yes he did like it better
Kristin: i hate saying to myself "hmm what machine did I have that file on" and then having to look in each account until I found it
Kristin: and keep N copies of the same files so they were on each machine when I needed them
Tom: I say now your files are centralized and you know where they are
Kristin: the overhead in managing all that...
Tom: he said: ftp was easy
Kristin: ftp is easy... not needing to is even easier!!
Kristin: what is the problem with a single home directory for all machines?
Kristin: did he mention any thing he felt was a drawback other than it reminded him of the old days?
Tom: he compiles things on linux and they don't run on solaris, he is also worried about the network slowness of downloading every file he uses to the local machine
Tom: its not a local file
Kristin: well the hope is that network speeds get fast enough where the time it takes from the perceptions of a human are indistinguishable
Kristin: i mean, should we go back over every other thing we do now all the time with computers that would have been "too slow" 20 yrs ago to do
Kristin: maybe we should get rid of all interpreted languages... too much time compiling on the fly every run
Tom: I don't notice any difference on a nfs home directory
Kristin: me either
Kristin: and i am sure he doesnt either
Why does it matter what some instructors think? They don't get it, why should I care? There are a couple of reasons that come to my mind.
The first one is that what instructors think, they pass on to the students. Each quarter they graduate a couple hundred students. Each will go to their new employer with whatever they have learned and experienced in school. I don't want them going there with the idea that Unix is doing things "a step backwards". I've seen the presence of Unix shrink and Windows grow in the Comp. Sci. Dept. at FooU over the last 12 years. It's finally turning around.
The other reason to care is that if this is what they see, this is what other customers and older system administrators will see too. How do you educate this group? They've been doing things the same way for years and something about change makes them uncomfortable. The previous Unix admin for FooU was this person. He is a nice guy and he knew his stuff. He kept the labs running... running just like it was still 1987 in 2003. It is any wonder the instructors and students got tired of using the Unix machines for classes and started switching Windows? Even I would pick Windows XP over Solaris 2.3. How do we get these guys into the 21st century (this is an honest serious question, I am seaching for the answer)?