#1 OpenSolaris bug: Microsoft Lock-in
Harry Lu pointed out that bug #1 in Ubuntu is:
"Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix."
Should I log a similar bug in defect.opensolaris.org?
Defect #1: "Users of the global internet should not be locked intoNote that this bug is slightly different from Ubuntu's bug #1, I don't mention new hardware because I'm just as concerned with the fact that existing desktop users are stuck in a quagmire they don't know how to get themselves out of. We have made some progress in fixing this bug:
- Since 1991 Java (now opensource) prevented the internet from becoming a Microsoft only domain.
- StarOffice/OpenOffice helped reverse lock-in caused by Microsoft Office.
- Firefox/Mozilla didn't win the browser wars, but smart web designers now have to consider the possibility of non Microsoft browsers which again prevents lock-in.
- Java will continue to provide an alternative to Silverlight and slow the lock-in which could be caused by this framework which ignores the Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD communities.
- VirtualBox gives people an alternative of running a more cost-effective, stable, secure and scalable OS on their hardware and put instances Microsoft Windows on top only to run whichever applications are locked to Windows and haven't yet been ported to the 21st century.
- ZFS Provides the first scalable multi-platform alternative to NTFS (Fat32 of course, has good multiplatform support but isn't scalable)
If Microsoft isn't afraid of Free and Open Source Software, why not open source and release patents on all of Silverlight and Windows (or whatever infrastructure is required to run Silverlight.) Sun is a much much smaller company and we released Java and our crown jewels O.S. to the community.
Posted at 11:17AM Sep 06, 2008 by Brian Nitz in OpenSolaris | Comments[4]
Intercontinental demand load balancing (outsource your carbon footprint!)
While visiting family in Wisconsin last summer, I learned that a Sun Ray client attached to servers more than 3500 miles away performed at least as well as a client at my home 8 miles away and nearly as well as clients right in the Dublin office. So, I was able to use Irish wind energy while working in a coal powered corner of Wisconsin. I wondered if this technique could be formalized into demand side transcontinental IT energy load balancing GRID? I wrote up the idea and with Sun's help, it was published in the September issue of Research Disclosure. At a time when oil prices are soaring and some are predicting that up to 50% of electricity load might eventually be devoted to IT, I can think of quite a few possibilities for this kind of grid system:
- Efficient alternative to carbon tax and trade:Wisconsin and many other parts of the world is not suitable for solar, wind, tide, hydroelectric or geothermal energy. When carbon taxes are enacted, places such as these could be at a severe economic disadvantage compared to Nevada, California and other places where carbon neutral energy sources are abundant. Industries in these places have few alternatives. They could wait for superconducting electricity grids and buy energy from elsewhere, they could pay the carbon tax and buy credits from other states, they could send jobs and industry to where energy is cheap and clean, or they could use demand load balancing to keep jobs and outsource the energy demand.
- Failsafe UPS:When I worked in South Florida, we could almost set our watches by the daily summer thunderstorms. Sometimes it would knock our power out five times a day. Even if the power glitch lasted only one second, it took the DEC servers a half hour to reboot and certainly disrupted our work day. Ideally, our servers would have been hosted somewhere where electricity was more reliable. A small solar panel (~3500 Watts) on the roof would have been sufficient to power 150 Sun Ray clients and their monitors. The lack of servers in our office would have also made it easier for our HVAC system to cope with the Florida heat.
- Shifting peak demand: Our least efficient, most expensive and most polluting power plants usually come on line during periods of peak demand. I've heard that some utilities paid as much as $0.45/kWh for peak electricity transferred over the conventional "supply side" electricity grid. Ever since air conditioning became popular, Wisconsin electricity demand peaks during late afternoon on the hottest days of summer. By contrast, Florida power demand peaks during the coldest winter nights because thats the only time of year when simple but inefficient electric heating systems are necessary. While there may be some occasions when both Florida and Wisconsin are at peak demand, IT demand load grid balancing could transfer load between northern and southern hemispheres if necessary. Use Australian solar energy to power your data center during a cloudy Irish winter night. Use Irish wind to power your Australian data center during a windless day.
- Optimizing peak load across timezones:One of the reasons Dublin's Sun Ray servers seemed faster to me when I was working from Wisconsin is that by noon Wisconsin time, many of the local users in the Irish timezone would have gone home. If the global grid load balancing system were smart enough, it could predict when and where server resources would become available. As timezones approach the end of their workday, they would advertise that resources are becoming available for timezones to the west. This could help flatten the daily energy demand peaks and allow us to use more efficient power sources.
If anyone has suggestions or alternative ways of using energy, I'm open to comments. Or you might want to consider writing up the idea and submitting it for possible publication at Research Disclosure. This is a useful publication service which allows the free exchange of ideas, while discouraging patent trolls.
Posted at 12:32PM Aug 18, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Environment |
August 16, 2008 Lunar Eclipse from Malahide Ireland
We had about three minute long cloud break during Saturday's lunar eclipse. The photo shows the moon rising in partial earth shadow. Malahide's St. Sylvester church is in the foreground. Moments later the clouds closed in and the mosquitoes descended upon us. It was time to go home.
Posted at 12:16PM Aug 18, 2008 by Brian Nitz in |
The great Firewall of {IrishIIShosts}.ie
(UPDATE EDITED 12 August 2008): Thanks to a friend at work and our network service diagnostic personnel and someone on the outside with the keys to the Great firewall of {Irish_IIS_Hosts.ie} I appreciate the fact that I can now access IIS Irish government websites from within Sun and download all of those immigration, work permit and tax forms. Thank you!
Posted at 11:23PM Aug 11, 2008 by Brian Nitz in General |
Angry about your personal data being "lost" to criminals? Tell someone about Sun Ray!
Another day, another laptop stolen, another 106,000 personal bank account details release to a criminal via theft of a laptop. Sigh. The first time a businessman offered to enter credit my card details into his laptop in the parking lot of his company, I cringed and my wife (who was then a loan officer) sternly reminded him of the dangers of identity theft. A few years later I learned that the blood clinic where I donated lost records on an unencrypted laptop, and now an Irish government laptop containing thousands of personal records went missing. I'm beginning to lose my patience about the lack over government and business stewardship of personal details. It's even more frustrating working for Sun and knowing that if the SunRay/Gobi laptop or any of the Sun Ray clients in our office were ever stolen, the criminal would get nothing, zip, zero, nada. One of the good things about living in a small country and if someone writes a polite letter to the comptroller and mentions that this secure technology is available, there is a good chance something will be done about it. So if your personal data has been mismanaged by government or business, try to find the CIO or Comptroller responsible for securing your personal data and politely enlighten them about the 21st century way of managing private records.
Posted at 11:04PM Aug 11, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Sun |
Thanks to the organizers of GUADEC 2008!
Many thanks to the organizers, volunteers and Gnomers who helped make GUADEC 2008 possible! There were a few glitches (please open up SSL and VPN ports next time!), but overall it was a success. I also appreciate being able to present my talk on measuring the GNOME footprint. If I'd anticipated the interest, I would have gone into more detail regarding the extensive use of dtrace in this study, but John Rice covered that well in his talk. I'll try to post the details here as soon as possible. I also appreciate the fact that my friend Andrei, a Google Summer of Code student, is eager to use some of my techniques in his memory profile study. It was great to see my friends again and I look forward to seeing them again at a future GUADEC!
The attached photo is an QtpfsGUI tonemapping of a RAW image I took from the roof of our hotel one night. Istanbul is truly an amazing city and though this image doesn't exactly capture the experience of being there, I hope it captures something of the mood.
Posted at 12:16AM Jul 16, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Open-Source |
Squandering solstice daylight
Light pollution is one of my pet peeves. For example, excessively bright and misdirected "security lights" illuminate some barns and gas stations to a level where dentistry and brain surgery could be performed. There seems to be an assumption that doubling the illuminated wattage per square meter halves the crime rate. I find that nighttime light pollution continues to grow worse in the U.S. Many children born east of the Mississippi have never seen more than a couple hundred stars. When an earthquake knocked out the lights in Los Angeles, 911 operators were flooded with calls wondering what that glow in the sky was... it was the Milky way. People had ever seen it before!
[Read More]Posted at 02:07AM Jun 21, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Environment |
My OpenSolaris for Developers talk at the Irish Opensource Technology Conference
I should thank the sponsors and organizers of the Irish OpenSource Technology Conference (IOTC) for giving me the opportunity to present OpenSolaris as an Open Source Developer Tool to some of Ireland's brightest and most energetic open source developers. There were quire a few university attendees and Barry was able to bring in people from small and midsized Irish companies such as openApp and hosting365 as well as multinationals such as Microsoft, IBM, RedHat, Sun and AIB (more about this later!)
My talk seemed to be well understood by the audience and I managed to empty out a heavy backpack full of ¨Free as in Free" OpenSolaris 2008.05 CDs afterwards. I didn't have enough time to talk about SMF or PKG(5) in detail, but I did spend some time on ZFS and Dtrace; both of which I'm certain would be useful to any Open Source developer. Even if your pointy-haired boss demands that you must code your application in VisualBasic and deploy on Redhat 3.5 via Wine, you can sneak OpenSolaris onto one of your QA department's test boxes and run your software in a zone where you can dtrace it. Or you could set up an OpenSolaris file server with ZFS snapshots as frequently as necessary (perhaps every keystroke for some UIDs?) I won't tell anyone... honest ;-)
One gentleman grabbed a CD and asked me if OpenSolaris 2008.05 was available on Sparc. Another asked whether zones could be Opensolaris as well as linux and whether you could have hundreds of copies of apache running independently in hundreds of zones each with its own isolated ports. One of the attendees had used dtrace before log ago, but he didn't know it could do so much. (Remind me to blog about my "anti-destruction, destructive dtrace script later!) A couple of university students spoke of Sun's mistakes in the past, were surprised that Sun was so involved with FOSS software. They said they didn't see much Solaris or OpenSolaris for years, but they're starting to see it more often again. Fantastic, the spark (if not Sparc) is back!
I caught the tail end of a RedHat talk on LVM2 later. I admire anyone with the Red Hat certified expertise required to do old-style volume management, but to see the amount of effort that goes into what anyone (including me) can do with a couple of ZFS commands makes me want to burn a stack of punched cards!
Posted at 12:19AM Jun 21, 2008 by Brian Nitz in OpenSolaris |
How to keep gam_server from doing too much
The Gamin file monitoring subsystem was introduced to OpenSolaris a few months ago. Since it monitors file changes, there are cases where it can become very busy and consume significant system resources. Most of the resource consumption issues will probably be fixed by build 92, but for those of us running OpenSolaris 2008.05 or Nevada builds before build 92, or those of us with special requirements such as remote NFS mounted home directories, AlekZ's Scratchpad has a very nice workaround to put gam_server back in its place. I'd recommend the following slightly modified workaround:
1. Create /etc/gamin directory:
# mkdir /etc/gamin
2. Create file /etc/gamin/gaminrc. It may contain the following lines (this is just an example, you can set your own polling intervals):
fsset nfs poll 15
fsset ufs poll 15
fsset lofs poll 15
fsset zfs poll 15
3. Restart gam_server (let me know if there is a better way):
# pkill gam_server ; rm -rf /tmp/gam_*
Posted at 11:01PM Jun 14, 2008 by Brian Nitz in OpenSolaris | Comments[1]
HDR Images with Qtpfsgui
I've been experimenting with tone mapping RAW images with the Qtpfsgui OpenSource tool. It's always difficult to get the sky and foreground things (like spring tree leaves or cherry blossoms) to be simultaneously exposed properly. In the chemical photography days, you'd have to dodge and burn in tiny areas of the photo to properly compress reality's tonal range onto the limited dynamic range of paper prints. I'd like to build Qtpfsgui for OpenSolaris, but it looked like the GNU/Linux versions depended on a particular development environment. Now I see that some versions seem to have been built with cmake which is portable to OpenSolaris. I'll let you know if I figure out how to build it.
Posted at 12:03AM May 24, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Open-Source | Comments[6]
Google streetview goes to Wisconsin
Google's GPS equipped cars visited Southeastern Wisconsin last summer, during some of the best weather Wisconsin has to offer. They visited my home town during one of the brightest days. It's amazing how thoroughly they've covered southeastern Wisconsin, practically every road and even the blue sky above in photos that are much sharper than those I've seen taken nearer to Google's California headquarters.
It's strange to be sitting over 3000 miles away and see neighborhoods I never visited while growing up there. I understand the privacy concerns. When virtually touring narrow streets in Racine such as Gideon Ct., you almost expect people to come out and yell at you for stepping on their flowerbeds. It is useful to see a destination before driving there for the first time and it's nice to be able to show friends the house I grew up in and also the brick houses overlooking Lake Michigan that my Pomeranian ancestors built when they emigrated to the U.S. in the mid 19th century.
I wonder if the fact that thousands of sub $200k houses are unsold in decent neighborhoods throughout the midwest might bring back a sense of reality to real-estate markets which seem to have lost the plot for a while. Compare the zillow.com price estimates for victorian houses on College Avenue, or anything near Racine's zoo or Wind point... to almost anything in Las Vegas or California and you'll wonder whether someone has their decimal point in the wrong place. But then Google might contribute to the problem of wealthy remote holiday homeowners driving local prices beyond the reach of police, firemen, teachers...
Taxes, lack of good jobs and weather are the three biggest problems with living in the "rust belt." Those of us from the upper midwest should thank Google for showing our part of the world in a good light.
Posted at 10:57PM May 23, 2008 by Brian Nitz in World |
Spring in Wisconsin
I recently returned to a visit with the family in Wisconsin. After more than 100 inches of snow in what was one of the snowiest winters since 1979, very few people were happy to see April snow showers. But we were. After a few grey wet Dublin winters, we enjoyed the April snowfall. The snow only lasted a few hours and spring came back in full force a few days later with temperatures in the 70s.
[Read More]Posted at 02:27PM May 14, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Environment |
Linux crash at 35000 feet (what happened to QA?)
The Aer Lingus Airbus 330-300 that my family took to the U.S. a few weeks ago was equipped with video screens on every seat. Each passenger had the choice of several video games, songs, TV shows and movies. My wife watched Cecelia Ahern's tearjerker "P.S. I love you", and after checking the options, I started the same movie about 30 minutes later on my screen and started a Snoopy/Charlie brown cartoon on my daughter's screen. It's pretty impressive when you think about it. The Airbus 330-300 can hold over 200 passengers and I'd expect that decent quality small-screen video requires about 1MB/sec. Hmm, come to think of it, 200MB/sec isn't that impressive, I think my old G3 powerbook usually managed to keep up with that speed of video data on its firewire port, but somewhere, one or more CPUs is very busy uncompressing up to 200 streams of video data.
The most interesting part of our experience came when my daughter decided that the sardonic "Peanuts" cartoon wasn't what she wanted so I hit the home menu button about 3/4ths of the way through her movie. The very instant I hit the home menu button, her screen went black and began booting a version of Red Hat Linux. Then I noticed that my screen and my wife's screen were also booting Linux. I looked around me, everyone's screen was scrolling the ugly text of the Linux kernel boot sequence, a tiny penguin peered from the upper left corner of each screen. "Did I do that?", I wondered. A few minutes later everyone was back to their movie as though nothing had happened. My wife commented that people have become so accustomed to computers crashing that this didn't surprise anyone. It looks like I'm not the first to have seen Linux crash onboard a flight. Another friend told us of a similar failure which wasn't resolved even after someone came from the cockpit on their flight in a failed attempt to repair and reboot the same entertainment system. Now if it might be necessary for someone to come from the cockpit to fly an entertainment system, shouldn't that entertainment system go through some good A?
Even with the occasional crash, X86 hardware running Red Hat Linux with MythTV or some other PVR software may be adequate for an in-flight entertainment system. Let's just hope the software used for fly-by-wire and air traffic control is more robust and more well-tested.
Posted at 10:07AM May 02, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Open-Source | Comments[1]
All time environmental boondoggle awards
It isn't always obvious to people outside of the U.S. why Joe-sixpack seems to have such a powerful allergy to conservation, efficiency and sensible environmentalism. The reason is that pseudoenvironmentalists have tried to pull the wool over his eyes many times in the decades since the first earth day, and because of the abysmal level of Joe-sixpack science literacy, they've usually succeeded. Wisconsin's Bill Proxmire was known as the founder of Earth Day and for his "golden fleece" awards for wasteful Congressional spending. In his honor, here are my nominations for the all time greatest environmental boondoggles:
- Magnetic gasoline mpg enhancers. (Add to this the German device which detects the "tachyon signature" of nuclear generated power and stops such energy at your outlet.)
- 1970s rooftop solar heating. Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair here. Some of these actually did produce heat, some even produced enough to pay for themselves over a decade or two. But because the qualification standards for President Carter's eco-subsidies weren't well enforced, many hideously inefficient devices were constructed. Sometimes the cost of the electricity to run the water pumps, the leakage of home heat on winter nights and other issues caused these devices to waste more energy than they saved and gave solar a bad name which hasn't yet been overcome in many parts of the U.S.
- "Clean" coal. Clean coal as currently defined releases exactly the same tonnage of CO2 per ton of coal burned as dirty coal did 100 years ago. Call me a skeptic but to date "carbon sequestering" may eventually also fall into the boondoggle category. Almost 1000 train cars full of coal enter a typical 1000 Megawatt coal power plant every day. Whether the CO2 created is compressed or converted into a carbonate, it would have more mass than the coal it came from. If you think looking for burial sites for nuclear waste is an unsurmountable problem, try to figure out where to hide 1000 train cars full of carbonate rock every day for each of the thousands of coal power plants all over the world.
- 21st century CF light laws. Like ethanol fuel, this can be a useful energy efficiency technology when used properly. I've used compact florescent lights since the early 90s when they were relatively reliable. But incandescent light bans and other misguided "environmental" laws have forced these to be used where they don't belong and seem to have created incentives for cheap junk bulbs to be shipped across the ocean only to end up in landfills. In my experience, 1 out of 5 brand name CF lights made in the 21st century are defective (i.e. last no longer then 6 weeks) and in many locales there is not yet a safe way of disposing of the dead bulbs.
- California's "Zero(sic) emission" vehicle laws which effectively gave coal powered cars an advantage over those fueled by gasoline.
- MTBE. This gasoline additive was designed to help gasoline burn cleaner but it proved to be very efficient at polluting waterways.
- Corn ethanol. Even farmers here in Wisconsin's corn belt are beginning to understand this as the biggest eco-boondoggle in our generation. Massive government subsidies are rewarding a handful of corporations in an industry which burns as much oil to produce as it replaces. It effectively burns food in U.S. automobile gasoline tanks and has already caused food price inflation and job losses.
This is just my first draft list but I'm open to suggestions. I could be convinced that any of these technologies isn't a boondoggle if someone shows me the science. Unfortunately the level of science literacy amongst citizens and politicians is very low. The level of government investment in ecology and energy efficiency scientific research is also relatively low. So we are left with the questionable science funded by vested interests and the political might of a handful of powerful lobbiests running the show. As P.T. Barnum put it, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Posted at 06:16PM Apr 22, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Environment | Comments[2]
Serving Sun Rays from inside a VirtualBox
Imagine you have some Sun Ray[tm] clients and you'd like to use them with some hardware which doesn't support Solaris. Or maybe you're running OSX, Windows or Ubuntu on some hardware which has some spare cycles but isn't running an OS which is supported by SRSS.
- Download a copy of VirtualBox for your operating system.
- Download a copy of Solaris 10 which is supported by SRSS3 and SRSS4.
- Download a copy of Sun Ray Server Software. I used SRSS 4.0 09/07. Note:Some GNU/Linux distributions are also supported, and SRSS can be forced to work with some unsupported Linux distributions and versions of OpenSolaris. But I'll stick with Solaris 10u5, it's reasonably lightweight and solid.
- For Solaris Nevada build 85 I ran
/usr/sbin/ifconfig -a
to get the name of the network interface and make sure networking is working. - Launch VirtualBox.
- Use New to Create a virtual machine.
- Go to settings and network for this virtual machine and set the networking Attached to: Host Interface and type the interface name from the ifconfig -a you just ran. Note:I found that using this "Host Interface" setting requires that you launch VirtualBox as root, though I'm sure there is a better way using RDAP profiles or something.
- Boot your VirtualBox and navigate to your Solaris 10 media. Install Solaris 10 (arguably the most challenging step, S10 installs are ugly and slow compared to any of the more recent OpenSolaris distributions.
- Login to your new Solaris 10 virtual machine.
- Make sure networking is working and that the virtual machine knows its own hostname.
- Get or set the virtual host's IP address {it will be used later}
- Copy the Sun Ray software into the virtual host environment. You may find that the virtual host can't ping its "Dom 0" parent, so copy to another machine or download SRSS from within the virtual host.
- Unpack the Sun Ray software and run
utinstall
. I usually go with all defaults but I leave the DHCP server turned off since there is usually a DHCP server on my network. - Configure the Sun Ray server:
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -c /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -A 192.168.1.0 # {allows you to server Sun Ray over this network } /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -L on # {enable LAN connection from Sun Ray} /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -n # {bring server online} /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utrestart - Now connect your Sun Ray client to the network or if you're already connected to another Sun Ray server, do this:
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utswitch -h {your VirtualHost's IP address"
VBoxHeadless -startvm {your vmname}
You can also access this headless virtualbox by using rdesktop:
rdesktop {parent host's IP}
It seemed to me that the responsiveness of the JDS desktop environment on the remote Sun Ray client was at least as good as the performance of the VirtualBox display on the local laptop.
Limitations: This does not allow you to display the MS Windows or Ubuntu environment on the Sun Ray client. For that you're better off running rdesktop on a real (not virtualized) Sun Ray server and running Windows in headless mode inside the VirtualBox.
Posted at 04:31PM Apr 03, 2008 by Brian Nitz in opensolaris-howto | Comments[3]
