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20080702 Wednesday July 02, 2008

OpenSolaris in review June 2008

Here's the news for June 2008 - things are still pretty hectic for me as I continue to learn my new day-job, so haven't been able to keep on top of the news as much as I'd like, and I've got a sinking feeling I'm missing some important stuff in the list below. So, if you feel like helping out, please add comments to this post.

If you really want to help out, and would like to become a guest-editor for July's news, drop me a mail and I'll send on the scripts I use when compiling the list - it'll still be a pretty time consuming task though (2 or 3 hours, typically), but it's for a good cause!

So, without further ado, here's some of the stuff that went on in June:

(2008-07-01 18:09:03.0) Permalink Comments [2]

20080611 Wednesday June 11, 2008

My first xVM putback

I did my first xVM gatekeeping putback today - pretty minor changes to some build scripts, but a nice way to ease myself into the joys of dealing with hg, MQ and our gate setup. Thanks to johnlev for helping me through the putback procedure!

For those that care, the bug was http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6710070 - and if anyone's interested, you can see the fix as a comment to this post.

My next task, is to tackle the xvm-unstable gate. At the moment, for contributers to the Xen Community on OpenSolaris.org, building the unstable bits is a bit unweildy - at least more so than building the current stable gate that's used for Nevada. We've got 3 repositories up there at the moment, but my aim is to make the rest of our repositories available, and get the build and gate management scripts to work regardless of whether you've got a sun.com email address.

(2008-06-11 08:05:10.0) Permalink Comments [4]

20080602 Monday June 02, 2008

OpenSolaris in review May 2008

Here's my roll-up of news on opensolaris.org during May - usual rules apply: if I've missed anything you care about, or have inaccuracies in my posts below, feel free to add comments.

I didn't manage to keep on top of news as much as I'd have liked during the month, so if the sysadmins notice that server logs on mail.opensolaris.org were a bit busier than usual for a Sunday evening, well, that was probably me digging around for links to post. Anyway enjoy!

(2008-06-01 16:41:32.0) Permalink Comments [1]

20080601 Sunday June 01, 2008

Bloom 2008

We visited Bloom 2008 this afternoon, after EB finally woke from her afternoon nap. The weather's been kind to us so far this bank holiday weekend and the sun was out again today! It was a good show, perhaps a bit too commercial, but strolling around the gardens, with a camera and my two favourite people was a perfect way to spend the afternoon (seeing as how we still don't really have a back garden of our own to speak of!)

Here's a few photos I took on the day

(2008-06-01 13:35:12.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080520 Tuesday May 20, 2008

The Last Week In Filesystems

Just back from 2 weeks vacation (had a great time, very relaxing, but I'm currently scaling mountains of laundry and email simultaneously) and I'm just starting into what's going to be my last week working in the ZFS Test group.

Before I left for our holidays in Spain, I found out that I'd been offered a job I'd been interviewing for - a position in the xVM development group. So I'm not going to be working in OpenSolaris QE anymore - rather than trying to find bugs in bits of OpenSolaris, I'm now going to be actively trying to avoid putting them in to begin with!

Specifically, the xVM guys wanted someone to help out with their gate-keeping work, freeing up John a bit more to work on other stuff. The timing here is good I think - we use Mercurial to manage the xVM gates, and as you know there's a project ongoing to move the rest of ON development over from Teamware to Mercurial (the SCM Migration project) so my getting involved here seems like a pretty exciting place to start. I'm expecting to be swooshing along a fairly steep learning curve quite soon - wish me luck!

For now, I'm going to be spending the rest of the week catching up on email, and making sure there's no loose ends with the ZFS test suite development work that I'd been helping with. As soon as I've found my feet in the new group, I'll let you know how things are going.

ZFS is still a rather exciting project to be involved with, so I'll try to keep up to date with what's happening (and intend to continue maintaining my automatic snapshot utilities, of course) - I've learnt a great deal during my time on Solaris QE, and will definitely miss working with the fantastic engineers who built ZFS - you guys rock!

Oh, and no - I know nothing about gin joints either!

(2008-05-20 06:01:42.0) Permalink Comments [2]

20080502 Friday May 02, 2008

OpenSolaris in review April 2008

Okay - here's my monthly roll-up of news from April. The usual rules apply - if there's something important I've missed, feel free to add a comment with more pointers. If the list below looks like there's slightly less news than usual, then that's probably because I'm eager to get offline and start my vacation (2 weeks in sunny Spain, family included! Viva España! :-)

(2008-05-02 10:21:43.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080430 Wednesday April 30, 2008

Wish I was there

There's two events coming up pretty soon that I wish I was able to attend:

The OpenSolaris developer Summit, May 2008

CommunityOne

Things have been pretty busy for me for the last few weeks. I've been helping with ZFS testing for putbacks to ON providing root filesystem support, and working on an ongoing putback for the same thing to the Install consolidation, helping test some backports of ZFS functionality to the next S10 update, and getting the opportunity to explore some new work stuff (which I'll talk about more in a future post)

While all this has been going on, we've been trying to get ourselves organised for an upcoming 2 week family vacation - which means I'm going to miss both OpenSolaris Developer Summit and CommunityOne: both opportunities to meet up with lots of the OpenSolaris folks - going to miss you guys! The summit last October was a blast, and this one sounds like it's going to be as good if not better, oh well.

On the plus side, I'm really looking forward to getting away for a while - it's my sister's wedding in Spain in May, and we're heading off on Saturday to stay over there for a while and generally get some much needed downtime. Haven't decided if I'm bringing a laptop or not, but leaning towards not at the moment!

Along with lots of QT with the missus and Bananas, I'm also looking forward to hanging out with the rest of the family, Gman included, who's jetting over from New Zealand, via the aforementioned conferences.

So, while I do wish I was there, I'm also glad I'm not (in a weird kind of way) - but am very happy that much of the summit will be recorded, so hopefully I'll be able to catch up when I'm back.

(2008-04-30 04:55:28.0) Permalink Comments [2]

20080402 Wednesday April 02, 2008

Another chance to see rv's NUMA talk (not sure when yet)

Just posted this to IE-OSUG mailing list:

We had a bit of a scheduling mishap with last night's meeting, which resulted in us deciding to cancel the meeting - we did hang around in the lobby of DIT till about 19:30 in case anyone else showed up, but my apologies if you missed us.

The good news, is that you still have a chance to catch Rafael's talk on NUMA machines and what was done in OpenSolaris to optimise performance on them. We're going to reschedule the meeting to a later date, but I'd like to try to find a time that suits as many people as possible.

On a more general note, a question to our members: how often would you like us to hold meetings: are we just killing ourselves trying to hold monthly meetings, or would less frequent meetings be better ?

Would you prefer more podcast content and fewer face-to-face meetings ? Are the topics that we've been doing of interest to our membership ? Are we publicising the meetings enough [ clearly not, given 5 people showed up last night, including the 2 speakers ]

Hopefully if we can get answers to the above, we might be able to inject more life into the user group! I'd really appreciate feedback that people might have.

cheers,

tim

(2008-04-02 01:06:16.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080401 Tuesday April 01, 2008

OpenSolaris in review March 2008

Here's the news for March - rather hastily thrown together I'm afraid, as I'm pretty busy on ZFS Root/Install test work (which hopefully will make next month's news :-) So as usual, the standard disclaimer applies: if you know of other interesting stuff that's going on, feel free to add a comment to this post.

I'm presenting this month and last month's news at the IE-OSUG meeting tonight so watch our podcast feed for the audio commentary when we get tonight's episode posted.

(2008-04-01 06:08:20.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080330 Sunday March 30, 2008

Garden leveling progress

We last left our intrepid hero worn out having moved 1.5 tonnes of gravel. This weekend, the real work started. The weather held out thankfully, and I was able to hire a rotavator (a Briggs & Stratton-engined Electrolux Ursa 6 - nice model name, I thought) on Saturday morning, and spent the day ploughing my back garden. It was pretty heavy work, but it kept me out of trouble.

Today, I started the task of leveling the garden - there isn't enough room to get a mini digger through to the back garden, so what I've done so far has been with a wheel barrow and a shovel, digging down about a foot in order to bring the garden level with the new patio steps. I've lots of topsoil now to make raised beds with, but that's work for another weekend.

I'm not sure if I'm going to get any time in evenings this week to finish the digging: ZFS Root/Install, the next IE-OSUG meeting and likely a few other appointments sound like they're going to keep me busy. So next weekend, I hope to get that part of the job done. Pictures below, for those keeping track:

Tim's garden re-leveling project Tim's garden re-leveling project

(2008-03-30 10:07:38.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080325 Tuesday March 25, 2008

Rescheduled: 18th Irish OpenSolaris User Group meeting

Short notice here, but as DIT closes early during the Easter break, we're going to reschedule the next IE-OSUG meeting to Tuesday the 1st April so that we don't have to start/finish the meeting early.

I've updated the meeting page here and have updated the dates on the poster below. Looking forward to seeing you all on Tuesday.

(2008-03-25 07:16:23.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080324 Monday March 24, 2008

On logo? (with apologies to Naomi Klein)

There's an interesting discussion going on at the moment in the OpenSolaris Advocacy community, regarding a new logo for OpenSolaris.

Everyone has an opinion - the logos Glynn's been posting aren't bad (I like the "Circles" one, but not the "O s" ones) Lots of people have been posting their own logos for the project and have been commenting about some of the ideas out there - it's hard to say whether all this is a done deal, or whether there's still time for better logos to emerge.

Art is hard, and logos are even harder, I can't even begin to imagine the aesthetic, cultural and legal aspects of designing a good logo (not to mention the technical ones!) - and in the meantime, there's a maelstrom of ideas out there, happily churning around.

So, to further muddy the waters and mix metaphors, here's another to add to the pool, which I prefer more than any of the current logos (as if my opinion matters! :-) I initially wrote about this idea here.

Comments welcome here, but you're far better off joining advocacy-discuss and contributing there. I've posted a link on that mailing list to the svg source of the image above, so while opinions are good, actual art is better!

(2008-03-24 11:04:50.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Where Tim launches himself at the garden again

Today's our last day of the St. Patrick's Day/Easter break - given the way public holidays fell this year in Ireland, I was able to take just 3 days off work and get a break from the office from Saturday 15th to today - I'm back in the office tomorrow.

We've spent the holiday sharing ourselves out between visiting my parents in Wicklow, getting away for a short stay in Athlone (with EB staying in Wicklow, the first time we've ever left her over night [she managed it better than we did!]) and visiting my in-laws in Carrickfergus.

We got back home last night, and despite enjoying my time off, I thought I really should have something to show for the few days off work (although you know what they say about time you enjoy wasting...)

It's been a few years since we last did anything major to the back garden, and since we recently had the front drive re-paved, and a small patio installed in the back garden, the rest of the garden was starting to look a bit shabby.

So here's the plan:

  • take up the gravel path we laid a few years back
  • re-level the back garden, creating proper raised beds this time (perhaps even a brick wall here & there ?)

Again, I'm still not exactly in Diarmuid Gavin or Monty Don territory, but I'd just like to neaten up the place a bit, and hopefully end up with a garden where we'll be able to play with EB during the summer and read a few books in peace. Bobby McFerrin has it right - simple pleasures are the best.

I tackled the first part today, taking up the gravel path - which meant moving about 1.5 tonnes of gravel from the path, saving it in a large hessian bag to lay down again later. It was heavy manual work, and I suspect I'll be a bit stiff tomorrow.

The next step will be done this coming weekend, weather permitting, when I'll hire a rotavater, and get to work trying to level the garden out a bit (the grass currently slopes gradually towards the house, resulting in slightly damp (mossy) grass towards the bottom). No doubt this will result in more stealth potatoes, but I can take 'em.

In the meantime, the back garden looks slightly chaotic - but it'll get worse before it gets better.


(sorry for the laundry in that picture above, the sharp-eyed reader will notice a "FSCK You" t-shirt hanging on the line. Note to self: this can be a bad choice of apparel when visiting your parents! :-)

(2008-03-24 08:34:19.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080313 Thursday March 13, 2008

Tales about using ZFS as a home fileserver

Simon Breden wrote to me the other day, pointing to a nice set of articles he'd written about how he setup a home file server using ZFS. It's a good write up on everything from choosing the hardware to thinking about disk layout and exploring some of the ZFS commands needed to create the server.

This is another case study that shows that ZFS isn't just for enterprises, it can be used quite nicely at home as well - well worth a read and a good introduction to ZFS if you're just getting started.

(2008-03-13 05:10:47.0) Permalink Comments [7]

20080312 Wednesday March 12, 2008

18th Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting

We're happy to announce the 18th Irish OpenSolaris User Group meeting! Rafael Vanoni is giving a talk about the changes that were made to OpenSolaris to support NUMA architectures. More information about the meeting, and a copy of the poster above is available on the Irish OpenSolaris User Group project pages.

If, after reading this post, you end up spending the rest of the day humming this then I'm not responsible, okay! You read the post, it's your fault! :-)

(2008-03-12 04:27:01.0) Permalink Comments [4]

20080307 Friday March 07, 2008

Duck^WWabbit^WElection season on opensolaris.org

I'm looking forward to the upcoming OGB elections and will be interested to hear what the candidates up for election believe are the issues and concerns facing the project and community as a whole. It'll be good to listen to Barton's interviews of the candidates also.

I had a few moments the other day to come up with a new graphic for the OpenSolaris front page to further publicise the election - and, given that I'd done the previous "open(2)" logo, you can tell the amount of creativity that went into thinking up this one - perhaps I'll just stick to computers, I'm not sure graphics-design is my strong point! Thanks Derek for fixing the fonts, and adding the extra text.

(Trivia: the code we've used for the various bits of OpenSolaris art produced so far, comes from turnstile.c, zio.c, open.c, audiohc.c and poll.c - am I missing any?)

(2008-03-07 05:50:15.0) Permalink Comments [0]

20080303 Monday March 03, 2008

OpenSolaris in review February 2008

Here's my latest roll-up of OpenSolaris news for February. Last month was pretty hectic for me (and for the rest of the project, based on the length of the list below!) - my day-job is busy right now, as well as having to prepare for the FOSDEM weekend. We didn't manage to get an IE-OSUG meeting organised, so there's no audio commentary on any of these items below just yet. I'll add a comment as soon as we have that recorded.

In the meantime, dive into the list below, and please feel free to suggest items I left out as comments to this post!

  • Wed Feb 6 18:00:39 PST 2008
    PSARC 2008/050 DTrace NFS v3 Provider
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/onnv-notify/2008-February/013428.html
    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/2008/050/onepager/

  • Thu Feb 7 10:51:26 PST 2008
    Automated installer requirements discussion started
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/caiman-discuss/2008-February/002233.html
    http://opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/auto_install/auto_requirements/

  • Fri Feb 8 18:45:01 PST 2008
    Further informal conversations around Conary
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/arc-discuss/2008-February/000658.html
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/arc-discuss/2008-February/000659.html
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/arc-discuss/2008-February/000663.html

  • Fri Feb 8 19:46:11 PST 2008
    SCM Migration status update
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/on-discuss/2008-February/000051.html

  • Sun Feb 10 21:50:30 PST 2008
    Nexenta Core Platform & Builder 1.0 released
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-announce/2008-February/001738.html
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-announce/2008-February/001739.html

  • Mon Feb 11 10:51:42 PST 2008
    More Schillix - 0.6.2
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/2008-February/038814.html

  • Tue Feb 12 20:03:51 PST 2008
    Test development project opens
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-announce/2008-February/001742.html

  • Tue Feb 12 17:54:43 PST 2008
    OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 available
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-announce/2008-February/001741.html

  • Wed Feb 13 19:57:26 PST 2008
    PSARC 2005/695 CIFS Client on Solaris
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/onnv-notify/2008-February/013453.html
    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/pages/2008021301/

  • Thu Feb 14 18:49:51 PST 2008
    Showing off Crossbow
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/crossbow-discuss/2008-February/001550.html
    http://blogs.sun.com/droux/entry/private_virtual_networks_for_solaris

  • Fri Feb 22 05:08:05 PST 2008
    Belenix wins FOSS India award
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-announce/2008-February/001750.html
    http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/24867/news.htm

  • Fri Feb 22 05:08:05 PST 2008
    OpenSolaris Members Meeting
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-announce/2008-February/001757.html

  • Sat Feb 23 18:30:37 PST 2008
    OGB Election Candidates
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/2008-February/039132.html
    http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/2008_OGB_Election_candidates

  • Tue Feb 26 11:23:59 PST 2008
    pkg(5) draft one-pager: Why we're changing the packaging system
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/pkg-discuss/2008-February/001852.html
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/pkg-discuss/2008-February/001906.html

  • Tue Feb 26 00:04:14 PST 2008
    Ideas for OpenSolaris projects
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/2008-February/039201.html

  • Wed Feb 27 01:28:12 PST 2008
    Milax: Damn Small OpenSolaris, a ~70mb distro
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/belenix-discuss/2008-February/000329.html
    http://milax.org/

  • Thu Feb 28 02:54:05 PST 2008
    Printer auto-magic: Presto Phase II
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/printing-discuss/2008-February/000736.html

  • Thu Feb 28 07:12:06 PST 2008
    50 ways to install OpenSolaris (well, 8 anyway!)
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/2008-February/039240.html

  • Thu Feb 28 10:39:01 PST 2008
    Filebench 1.1.1 available
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/perf-discuss/2008-February/003260.html

  • Fri Feb 29 16:20:46 PST 2008
    FMRI terms available in process contracts
    http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/dtrace-discuss/2008-February/005745.html

    • (2008-03-03 07:32:58.0) Permalink Comments [3]

    20080227 Wednesday February 27, 2008

    OpenSolaris at FOSDEM - trip report

    I've finally recovered enough to talk a bit about how we got on at FOSDEM last weekend.

    All in all, it was a really hectic few days, getting up at 4am on Friday morning to get to the airport to make the red-eye flight to Brussels, and then coping with the hour time difference between Dublin and Brussels during a trip that had us burning the candle at both ends (getting up at 6:30am was really getting up at 5:30am on Ireland-time, still I've got a 17 month old daughter, so that prepared me for it a bit!)

    The OpenSolaris stand was staffed by: (alphabetically)

    We also had special guest appearances from Steve Lau, Adrian De Groot, Jan Schmidt and Michal Bielicki - thanks for the help guys!

    Our stand was a table, with a few chairs, a large OpenSolaris banner in the background, a few boxes of OpenSolaris starter kits, lots of copies of the Student guide (part of the "An Introduction to Operating Systems, A Hands-On Approach Using the OpenSolaris project" book) and not enough copies of the current OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 LiveCD!

    In terms of hardware, here's what we had with us, mostly brought from the Sun Netherlands office by Joep and Casper:

    • 1 x Ultra 40 (with the metal side of the case removed, the inner plastic cover ensuring both proper airflow and a lovely view of the hardware) - this was our Sun Ray server for...
    • 3 x Sun Ray 2FS units - 2 were at our booth, one beautifully painted with the KDE logo, and the matching KDE-skinned unit was over at the KDE booth (so we could do some demos of hot desking via a very very long ethernet cable, snaking around the corridors of the university where the conference was held) Joep and Casper did most of the work to get the Sun Ray server up and running, with Adrian providing the KDE goodness.
    • 2 x 20" flat screens
    • 1 x 15" MacBook Pro running SXCE on bare-metal and OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 in a VirtualBox (or was it a xVM domU?)

    • 1 x EEE PC also running OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 (which I'm really glad I managed not to break during the course of the weekend!)
    • Assorted other laptops floating about.

    Between the Ultra 40 with it's innards exposed, the beautifully skinned Sun Ray clients and my tiny Eee PC (which now runs Compiz very smoothly indeed!), our stand had a lot of things to pull in quite a crowd - indeed we caused minor traffic jams in the hall from time to time.

    Common questions asked by visitors to our stand were:

    • "An Eee PC - wow, where did you get it!?" (followed by me giving a quick run-down of it's hardware, and then pure astonishment when they were told that we were actually running OpenSolaris on it, booting a ZFS root from a 4gb SDCard - cue ZFS demo)
    • "What's inside those thin clients?" (followed by amazement when we did the hot-desk demo, including redirection of YouTube audio from one Sun Ray to another)
    • "Is that OpenSolaris running on a Mac Book?"
    • "Why should I run OpenSolaris instead of Linux ?"
    • "Which version of OpenSolaris should I run ?"

    All of which gave us ample opportunity to enthuse about our project, point out why we thought it was worth a try, find out what people liked and disliked about the project and admit to things we agreed needed work. Pointers to the OpenSolaris New User FAQ and the Unix Rosetta Stone were also well received.

    ZFS and DTrace were obvious attractors for people coming to the stand - the down side was some occasional negative feedback about the opensolaris.org website, mainly confusion as to which distributions people should be running - we need to work on that imho.

    In general though, I felt pretty good about being at FOSDEM - I learned a lot by having to talk about our OS on many different levels, everything from discussing the design of ZFS, to one nice person asking what sort of tools were available on OpenSolaris that a Windows administrator would be able to use (I gave a quick demo of Webmin - which looks really nice these days)

    We even had some folks from a Belgian TV station who were brought to our stand by the FOSDEM organisers looking to do a short piece about my Eee PC - I showed them OpenSolaris running on it: they asked if I could boot the factory-installed Linux on it instead, which I declined politely, stating that OpenSolaris was a free and open source operating system too, and with a quick reminder that it also had an easy-to-use interface, they were happy to talk to Gilles (who speaks French) on TV - I just wish the "<i boot>" OpenSolaris stickers were a little larger!

    Of course, it wasn't all work - after 6pm we were able to take in some of the nightlife of Brussels, and as a beer aficionado, I was in just the right place! We also got to meet up with Simon and some of the other Sun folks over for the conference: good beer and great conversation, always a nice combo.

    Finally - I definitely need to praise the hard work of Patrick for organising our presence at FOSDEM, we really couldn't have done it without his help, and I was absolutely delighted to have been invited over to the conference.

    Here's hoping OpenSolaris becomes even more popular by FOSDEM 2009, we've an interesting year ahead!

    (2008-02-27 12:08:17.0) Permalink Comments [2]

    20080225 Monday February 25, 2008

    Back from FOSDEM

    Just got back from FOSDEM this morning - far too tired to write up full account, except to say that it's an amazing conference, and I think the OpenSolaris stand was pretty popular. More to come as soon as I've had some sleep!

    (2008-02-25 06:52:03.0) Permalink Comments [0]

    20080218 Monday February 18, 2008

    OpenSolaris at FOSDEM

    I’m going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting

    I'm heading over to FOSDEM at the end of this week and am really looking forward to it. My task? To be an OpenSolaris guy on the ground, help out at the OpenSolaris table, and answer any questions you might have about the project.

    Of course, secondary objectives include mussels & chips with stevel and perhaps a bit of tourism around Brussels in the evening if there's any time to spare.

    Hopefully, if I haven't broken it by then (not a bet I'd take, by the way) I'll also have with me my little Eee PC running OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 - a 7" laptop, booting a ZFS root filesystem from a 4gb SD card.

    If people had told me 10 years ago that we'd have a free (in all senses of the word) Solaris-derived OS running on one of these machines, I'd probably have asked who's round it was, but as I've said before, nothing beats a demo :-) If you're over at FOSDEM, drop by the OpenSolaris stand and say "hi!"

    (2008-02-18 08:24:41.0) Permalink Comments [0]

    20080214 Thursday February 14, 2008

    More OpenSolaris trademark discussions on ogb-discuss

    There's lots of traffic on ogb-discuss at the moment - both for and against the sentiment issued in Sun's responses to the OpenSolaris Trademark Questions.

    As always, the excellent John Plocher has responded to several mails with a carefully considered post, which expresses how I feel about the whole thing particularly well - an excerpt:

    As with any change, there are unanswered questions, uncertain futures, and activities that may become more difficult. There will also be opportunities and benefits that hopefully will outweigh those downsides.

    If only we'd stop shooting ourselves in the feet.

    John's original post is here.

    I want to see more OpenSolaris distributions running on everybody's computers: helping to solve the trademark issue by collaborating on the Trademark usage and branding guidelines, along with resolving the parking lot items will let us progress towards that goal.

    For the record, I'm still happy that Indiana is being called "OpenSolaris" not because it came from SMI, but because it looks like it's in the best position right now to get more people using computers running on the OpenSolaris codebase - if other distributions can match, or hopefully exceed that in the future, then the de-facto distribution will no longer be OpenSolaris, it'll be that distribution instead, whatever it's called.

    Ultimately, I'm happy to let the users vote with their feet.

    (2008-02-14 04:18:26.0) Permalink Comments [3]

    20080203 Sunday February 03, 2008

    17th ie-osug meeting report

    We held the 17th IE-OSUG meeting last Thursday - a reasonably successful night, despite everyone who got the train over from East Point arriving a bit late, myself included - sorry guys!

    Mark Deegan, a lecturer from DIT kicked off the night with an ad-hoc talk about computing at DIT - he's trying hard to get more UNIX included in the computing courses there, and is doing a pretty good job seeding the department with people who have more UNIX skills. Getting more OpenSolaris in Universities is critical to the success of the project, so huge thanks to Mark for helping out here! Some of us pointed at the curriculum docs on opensolaris.org, so perhaps snippets from this course could be scattered throughout the various courses at DIT?

    Mark also made a call for feedback for ideas on how they could further utilise their pretty extensive UNIX/Solaris/SunRay lab - maybe we'll see a few entries into the OpenSolaris Innovation Awards from DIT students as a result.

    Next up, I gave a run down of the OpenSolaris news from December and January.

    To finish the talks, Jan - who's recently joined Sun, gave an amazing demo of GStreamer managing a video feed from a webcam attached to an OpenSolaris laptop. The high point of the evening for me (and I think most people in the room!) was an impromptu performance of how GStreamer could be used to do live green screen effects on OpenSolaris. In my view, the best technology demos leave the audience grinning from ear to ear, and this was no exception - seeing Jan play a video in a colour-bound area, superimposed over a live feed from the webcam was really cool! I've since had a few people ask for the shell history of this talk (as you can imagine, it doesn't come over on the podcast very well!) - unfortunately, I wasn't able to save that, but Jan's written up his presentation in a blog post - which is well worth checking out.

    We didn't have time to cover the last lightning talk - a review of ZFS since it integrated into the OpenSolaris codebase two and a half years ago. Perhaps if there's interest in that topic, we can cover it in a future meeting. Feedback welcome.

    We finished off the night with some great food & beer over at The Bull & Castle, where the chat continued till closing time :-)

    I've got the audio now added to our podcast feed - our typical bad quality audio is somewhat worse than usual this time around, I've done my best to reduce noise as much as possible, but apologies for any headaches this causes - we'll try to do better next time.

    (2008-02-03 06:47:35.0) Permalink Comments [0]

    20080131 Thursday January 31, 2008

    OpenSolaris in review January 2008

    January's been a busy month in OpenSolaris. As usual, feel free to update the comments with stuff I've unintentionally left out!

    (2008-01-31 10:05:58.0) Permalink Comments [0]

    20080125 Friday January 25, 2008

    Indiana at the SVOSUG, January 2008

    Last night/this morning Jim Hughes and others spoke at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group about Indiana, the new packaging system (IPS) and gave some thoughts on the future of OpenSolaris.

    The SVOSUG folks streamed the meeting live via UStream.tv, and if you happened to be awake, you could visit the streaming media site, and add comments in real-time - nice! As our user groups are so geographically dispersed, I'm really happy that Alan DuBoff and Bob Palowoda put in the work to better accommodate remote participants - US toll free numbers are only toll-free if you're calling from the States! [ Hey, perhaps the OGB could record their meetings this way ? ]

    Anyway as it turned out, last night I had a minor case of insomnia and managed to catch some of the meeting, from about 4am GMT onwards. Thankfully though, anyone who got a decent night's sleep can still catch up, and view the recorded video of the session.

    I'm more of an audio guy myself though, so I thought it might be worthwhile ripping the audio feed, and posting it for your listening pleasure. You can now find this in the Irish OpenSolaris User Group Podcast feed.

    I haven't listened to the entire meeting yet, it's 2.5 hours long, but what I've heard is pretty interesting stuff. Hope you find this useful!

    (2008-01-25 11:52:53.0) Permalink Comments [3]

    20080122 Tuesday January 22, 2008

    ZFS Automatic Snapshots 0.10

    I've got a new version of the ZFS Automatic Snapshot SMF Service finished.

    This release contains two bugfixes, one pointed out by Reid Spencer, and the other from Breandan Dezendorf - thanks for the bugs guys, much appreciated!

    There's also a small new feature in this release, suggested on the zfs-discuss mailing list by Eric Kustarz. That is, that the service should avoid taking snapshots when zpool resilvering or scrubbing is happening.

    I'm hoping this feature is only a temporary requirement - but 6343667 has more detail.

    The implementation of this is pretty basic, but it works fine - there's a new property in the SMF manifest "zfs/avoidscrub", which is set to true by default. When executing the crontab entry, if this property is set to true, we check to see that the pool backing the dataset we're about to snapshot is currently mid-scrub or resilver. If it is, we report a message to syslog, and skip the current dataset for this invocation of the cron job.

    I've updated the README and you can download these changes as zfs-auto-snapshot-0.10.tar.gz.

    Hope this of use to people out there. As always comments and bug reports would be most welcome!

    (2008-01-22 07:19:40.0) Permalink Comments [20]

    20080121 Monday January 21, 2008

    So perhaps DTrace couldn't have saved the day after all

    Pretty amazing stuff here from Adam Leventhal - a few months ago, I was really looking forward to seeing DTrace on OS X: it now sounds like the implementation of DTrace there has missed the point in some fundamental ways.

    "Systemic tracing" to me means all of the system, not just the bits the lawyers are happy to let you look at. Here's hoping the Apple engineers get this sorted out.

    [ Disclaimer: I haven't bought a copy of Leopard yet. I still find it a bit weird that I have to pay for something that includes ZFS and DTrace, when I can get working versions of them for free in my preferred operating system. If my Mac is still supported when 10.6 comes out, I might upgrade to that. For now, 10.4 does everything I need. ]

    (2008-01-21 06:16:01.0) Permalink Comments [0]

    20080117 Thursday January 17, 2008

    17th Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting

    I just sent a mail announcement about our next IE-OSUG meeting, which is on Thursday January 31st 2008.

    We haven't managed to scare up any main presenters this month, but that's okay - we've got a good deal of news to cover since we skipped a meeting in December, so we'll roll up news from Dec and Jan to begin with.

    We're also going to try to run some Lightning Talks again - these worked pretty well the last time we did them, but they do really depend on volunteers to talk. It's pretty easy to talk for 5 minutes about something you care about - whether that's the latest feature in OpenSolaris, or some things that really bug you about the OS, or some ideas you have about user group activities, so hopefully we'll get a good range of speakers - it's up to you to participate :-)

    Update 21st Jan: Please note the change of room for this meeting - it's now on in room KA:G-026, which is on the ground floor of the (newer red-brick) Annexe building at DIT Kevin Street. I've updated the IE-OSUG webpage as well as the poster that's attached to it.

    (2008-01-17 06:50:42.0) Permalink Comments [1]

    20080104 Friday January 04, 2008

    OpenSolaris in review December 2007

    Sorry these are a bit late - I was busy enjoying festive cheer over the holidays! As always, please feel free to add comments if I'm missing anything important, and I'll update the main post. There's no audio commentary this month, as we didn't hold an IE-OSUG meeting in December, and I didn't get a chance to record a podcast of me reading these - hopefully the links alone will tell the stories.

    (2008-01-04 03:29:55.0) Permalink Comments [1]

    20080102 Wednesday January 02, 2008

    x86 bioses and eee pc woes

    Just thought I'd write a few lines here to document experiences with the excellent little eee pc that arrived just before Christmas.

    It was going great - I had done some preliminary investigations at getting it to run Solaris from an external disk, and posted the same to the laptop-discuss list. Garrett had suggested some ideas around getting wifi to work, and I was planning on looking into those more while I'm still on vacation.

    However something happened the other day that's left me with a warm brick! I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but on a reboot, I was presented with a screen saying that the bios was corrupted, and that the system was looking for a new rom on an attached USB disk. Not having one to hand, and running on battery power anyway, I turned off the machine (thinking, that if it's managed to restart once with a corrupted bios, it'd do so again when I've had a chance to download the latest bios image)

    Bad move. The machine now doesn't start at all - it doesn't even get to the bios splash screen. No combinations of:

    • removing the battery and power supply and leaving it for a few hours
    • hitting alt+f2 during boot to flash the bios from an attached usb disk
    • pressing the 'reset' button on the bottom
    have helped so far - on powering on the machine, I get the green power light and the blue wireless light showing, and that's all that happens - no bios splash screen, no output to the display or the attached vga display :-(

    So, I've logged a ticket with Asus tech support, and have dropped a mail to my reseller to see what the story is at getting a replacement under warranty - my machine shouldn't have broken, and I haven't messed with the factory-installed linux OS nor have I altered the hardware in any way.

    In general, this sort of thing is what I hate about PC bioses - there should always be a way to rescue a dead machine. Something like a hardware switch you can use to boot the machine from a read-only bios that has enough smarts to allow you to flash the redundant bios chip with a fresh image, or at the very least bring the machine up to a state where you can save your data somewhere (in my case, since the SSD in the machine is soldered onto the motherboard, getting my data back isn't just a simple case of popping the hard disk!)

    So, for now, I'm back to being without a laptop - oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Excellent start to 2008 - it can only get better :-) If anyone else has come across an eee pc in this bricked state with a potentially corrupted bios, I'm all ears, comments welcome!

    (2008-01-02 02:11:35.0) Permalink Comments [6]

    20071221 Friday December 21, 2007

    OpenSolaris on a tiny laptop - first impressions

    Hurrah, my Eee pc arrived this afternoon - thanks gbax.com!. Getting my hands on one of these this side of Christmas was a challenge - Asus it seems just can't make them fast enough, but the excellent customer service from GBAX put other (larger) retailers to shame.

    I haven't had much time to experiment around with the machine so far, but I have been able to plug an external disk with the Indiana preview on it, to see what's supported.

    Out of the box, it boots as far as a gdm login screen, and with an external USB keyboard, I can get to a full desktop session. In general, it's pretty responsive and it didn't feel like I was running on a slow machine.

    As suspected, the wired nic isn't detected, and neither is the wireless one - I'll post prtconf and scanpci output in a while, it might just be a case of tweaking driver aliases (since Solaris has support for the ath wifi card I think)

    The laptop's keyboard also doesn't work on boot - from a bit of playing about, doing a modunload of kb8042 and modloading it again, followed by "devfsadm -i k8042" makes the keyboard work, but on rebooting, the same problem occurs. I haven't worked out what the problem is yet, but it's early days and I don't have time to experiment more tonight.

    Otherwise, when running linux on the box, everything just works - the keyboard will take a bit of getting used to, but I wouldn't give up the form-factor of this little device!

    Will post more if I manage to get more stuff working under Nevada.

    (2007-12-21 14:17:51.0) Permalink Comments [6]