smf(5) not-quite-free stuff

I'm in the middle of some longish, and one rather preachy, blog posts. These will need editing, so to pep things up...

Like one of these?

We had a bunch of custom mugs made up, to commemorate the completion of smf(5)'s integration into Solaris 10. If you've been at a customer or community presentation on S10 or smf(5), you might have received one: for asking a good question, for answering one from me, or for physical attendance. But these mugs—fine, solid, large capacity, high quality mugs for coffee, tea, or even pens—are heavy: too heavy for us to lug a box to all the conferences we might attend.

So instead we're going to run a little contest.

Liane summarized our understanding of other service conversions circulating a few months ago. I'd like to get another batch done, and there's no incentive like a ceramic container incentive, so I'm going to suggest a few categories:

1. Historical: Convert one (or more) of the unconverted services in /etc/rc*.d in Solaris 10.
2. Free/Open: Convert a F/OSS daemon to be an smf(5) service.
3. Commercial: Convert a commercial software package to be one or more smf(5) services.
4. Artistic/Offbeat: Convert something unexpected into a particularly elegant service.

The conditions are pretty simple: there are 36 mugs in the box, so the first round can have 36 winners. One mug for each converted service; the winning entry for a specific service will be judged by completeness (dependencies in particular), correctness (methods), utility (will anyone else use this?), and date received. I'll give some no-prize honorable mentions in each category as well. This round will be quick: entries must be received by June 15th.

An entry should disclose:

• Your name,
• preferred email,
• blog URL (optional),
• mailing address,
• description of the software (plus details if obscure) and
• the service manifest and method(s) (if any), or
• an accessible URL to same.

Services on the list Liane gave are not eligible, unless you think your conversion is substantially better by the criteria above.

If your conversion wins, I'll send you your mug via an amazing cooperative, potentially international, mechanism composed of government-granted-monopoly package delivery agencies. Winners, and their entries (or pointers) will be posted here.

[ T: Solaris smf ]

Pop-up papercasting

I think papercasting is amusing. A lot of my work at Sun is critical in nature, meaning I feel much of my added value comes during the review phase of various documents (whether that document is text or code). A week ago, I spent a morning working on paper while my car was being serviced; as a typical engineering interval, I thought my working notes might be of interest to someone.

Reading them over, I realized that the notes rely too much on my context, which papercasting wouldn't fix. Hence, a little browser scripting and pop-up papercasting becomes a way to fill in the background on what some of the tasks mean.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ T: papercast ]

smf(5) in Hungarian

Introducing people to smf(5) can't be limited to English-speaking audiences—everybody needs to know how the system works. On blogs.sun.com's lesser-known sibling site, mediacast.sun.com, Cserép János has posted his Hungarian introduction to smf(5).

In case you couldn't guess, szolgáltatások means service.