Monday July 19, 2004

First cellphone/PDA virus?
From today's papers:

"Hand-held computers have come under attack from a virus for the first time, it was revealed today.

Called Duts, the virus attaches itself to files on machines running Microsoft software and infects nearby machines whenever an item such as a business card or game is sent wirelessly. Experts fear the discovery could pave the way for the first mobile phone viruses which they say would be "virtually impossible" to protect against. They admit they are struggling to track how many copies of the new virus exist."

"According to Mark Sunner, of computer security company MessageLabs, mobile phone viruses could be almost impossible to stop.

He said: "The problem is that a phone is just too small to run anti virus software. It could be a huge problem and phone networks need to take a serious look at the problem. Desktop virus software looks for more than 90,000 viruses and that just won't fit on a phone."

London Evening Standard

Another reason to get a Java phone? :) (2004-07-19 08:02:29.0) Permalink

Monday July 12, 2004

Performance analysis Ever tried to analyse the output of iostat, netstat, nfsstat, vmstat, etc., to work out just what a Solaris system is doing?

A few months ago I was pointed towards dim_STAT, a browser-based front end that takes all that info and graphs it in charts, histograms, etc., to help analyse a problem for a customer. It helped a lot, both I and the customer now understand a lot more about the behaviour of the system we were looking at.

dim_STAT can be downloaded externally at http://dimitrik.free.fr/ It's not a Sun product, nor Sun-supported, but is written by one of the guys who works on benchmarking in Paris and he gives a pretty good turnaround on questions. It doesn't do all the analysis, in the way that the SE toolkit does, and you'll still need Adrian Cockroft's Performance and Tuning book to hand, but dim_STAT presents all the important info in a very readable format. You can easily compare, for example, network load, CPU oaod and disk load, all on a single chart

I've only tried it on Solaris/SPARC, but as far as I know it runs on Solaris/x86 and on Linux. (2004-07-12 08:15:56.0) Permalink

Live Upgrade I used to be the sort of techy person that would play with any new feature as soon as it was available, but these days I haven't the time. At least, that's my excuse for not having tried Live Upgrade on Solaris before. On Friday I wanted to upgrade my desktop to a more recent S10 build, and not wanting to be without it for half the day I tried LU for the first time.

Wow!

I don't think I've found any command with as high a functionality:namelength ratio before! Just type lu, and up comes a menu. A few taps on a keyboard, type in the path to the packages, <enter> once or twice, and its ready. A couple of hours later, reboot, and the upgrade is done with almost no downtime. Even the inevitable tidying up, to restore my customizations, is easy when I can have each environment side-by-side in terminal windows.

Now, I always knew, intellectually speaking, that LU was supposed to be that easy, but actually seeing it happen so smoothly is just amazing.

Hey guys, this is neat! (2004-07-12 05:49:37.0) Permalink

Monday July 05, 2004

Summertime I always like the week of July 4th. Sun US closes for the week, so those of us in Europe get a week with no late meetings, no overflowing inboxes... Time to catch up on all the work that has piled up over the last month, and still get home in time for dinner :) (2004-07-05 00:50:17.0) Permalink

Tuesday June 29, 2004

blogging

First blog I've put here. People used to say that the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Blogs feel the same way, where should I put it? Can I share them? I'll learn. Interesting that the spell checker doesn't know "blog".

Started the morning with a physiotherapy session, having put my back out a while back. What a great way to start the day, 30 minutes massage from an (admittedly tall, slim and attractive) physiotherapist. If only every day could start off so relaxed. Doesn't last long, but while it does...

Quote from silly calendar on my desk:

Weakest link host: "Of what ancient civilization was Memphis the capital?"
Contestant: "Tennessee"

(2004-06-29 06:11:40.0) Permalink