Kool Aid Served Daily

I found a really neat tool on BigAdmin: Sun Device Detection Tool. Okay, I got pushed there by a reply by John Brewer in a opensolaris-rfe thread: Re: SATA support. This BigAdmin article has a Java-based tool to browse your system to tell you what hardware it has and whether or not Solaris 10 11/06 has a driver to support each item.

So the hardest system I have is my Fujitsu P7010D. And here is what the tool reported:

Now I don't care about the modem - I haven't in years. As for the wifi chip, I know it is supported in Nevada and I think it should work in Solaris 10.

I just posted the presentation schedule for Connectathon 2007 as Talks 2007. The talks are open to the public (go ahead, jam the room and ask probing questions):

Parkside Hall
180 Park Ave.
San Jose, CA 95113

This is the building which is connected to the The Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose. In most other cities, I'd tell you to look for the introverted and pale computer geeks. That wouldn't work for that area.

In reading one of Stephen's older blog entries a steaming pile of p.o.o., he has the hackergotchis for the planet.opensolaris.org contributers.

I found this web tutorial: my head, so I tried to follow it to get my very own hackergotchis:

As you can see, I didn't get the drop shadow done correctly, so I decided not to do it.

One of the things we got asked about last year at Connectathon 2006 was where was the OpenSolaris station? Well, I just asked my manager that question and also volunteered to staff that station at Connectathon 2007. And he agreed that we should do it.

The commitment to OpenSolaris is pretty deep at Sun. He didn't question whether it would work, how it would impact the other stuff I'm supposed to be doing at Cthon, or impose any other typical management hurdles. He just said. "I like it!"

Now I have to figure out how to tie OpenSolaris and NFS together for the event. I don't have an outstanding body of work that is being done outside of Sun. But I don't need to have that ready, I can take a project which I've been developing at Sun.

I guess I'll get coverage of the In-Kernel Sharetab project that I have been working on - it moves /etc/dfs/sharetab into main memory. This should allow for faster bootups with a larger number of shares (the file lock is gone and think of thousands of ZFS filesystems - one per user) and also allow the delegation of ZFS filesystem creation to non-root users. /etc/dfs/sharetab is owned by root and is marked as read-only. ZFS doesn't use RBAC - it uses acls. So to modify the file, you need a setuid program to change your effective UID. With my changes, ZFS can have sharemgr make a system call to add a share for a new filesystem.

Okay, I need to do these installs on systems other than my laptop - it is slow. I took the DVD I made from the modified ISO image in How to determine sizing requirements for adding packages to .packagetoc files and this time SUNWonbld was correctly installed.

I did things a little different than before, namely when I created the install staging area:

# cd /isos/mnt/x86
# find . -depth -print | cpio -pdm /kanigix/b55b

I did this instead of a tar or straight cp.

Also, when I built the image, I used:

# mkisofs -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -l -L -r -N -d -D -o /isos/kanigix.iso /kanigix/b55b

When I built the image, we see it is getting closer in size to the original:

# ls -al k* x86/b55b/solarisdvd.iso 
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     3875280896 Jan 21 19:58 kanigix.iso
-rw-rw-r--   1 root     root     3947546624 Jan 16 22:17 kanigix.iso.1
-rw-rw-r--   1 root     root     3893268480 Jan 18 15:31 kanigix.iso.2
-rw-rw-r--   1 tdh      staff    3857448960 Jan 16 15:32 x86/b55b/solarisdvd.iso

I still think it is larger than it should be, but I'll get it down in size. The next steps are to get the Companion CD on the image and have it automatically install - I miss sudo and vim. I also want the install to automatically add the Sun compilers. I.e., this system out of the box should be able to build itself, with the exception of the closed tree.

Note that there had been some concern that my DVDs would release those closed trees. That actually can't happen unless I include the source workspaces from inside Sun. The DVD images I'm playing with to support my build machines at Connectathon 2007 are the same images that are deployed for early access by Sun. The only difference is that I get them earlier and I can't distribute them. And actually, the Nevada 55b images are now up as the Solaris Express - Community Release. I could download an image from that external site and it would be exactly like the one I have.