Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Solaris Express 3/05 available March 29

Just saw the note saying that it will be available on Tuesday. As in the February build, Solaris Express is based on the current development code, currently called Nevada). This release is based on build 9.

You will now start to see bug fixes going into Nevada prior to backporting to the released versions of Solaris.

The mozilla issue is still there. This was fixed for build 10 so should be fixed in the following release.

Some of the new stuff this month includes

• New plockstat arguments - see plockstat(1M) for -e, -n count, -v and -x.
• New lockstat argument - see lockstat(1M) for -x.
• Network Layer 7 Cache - completes the integration of the Network Cache Accelerator into the kernel by porting it's HTTP layer and object cache into sockfs.
• Kernel level atomic operations - see atomic_ops(9f).
• Added functionality to poolbind to execute a given command bound to trhe named pool (see poolbind(1M), specifically -e.

Technorati Tag: SolarisExpress

Posted at 12:35PM Mar 29, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris Express  |  Comments[1]

Voice and myjxta

I was talking to James today on myjxta and he mentioned new extension he was playing with. Voice over IP.

Being the communication junkie that I am, I had to give this a go.

OK, loaded up the jnlp file and ran it up on SWAN¹ chatting with polo, but apparantly I was breaking up pretty badly.

OK, they recently fixed the wireless connections up on this floor, so I then tried dropping off SWAN and connecting to the wireless (under Solaris Nevada build 10 with some very alpha wireless drivers added in to the mix). After a bit of fiddling with it, I managed to get myjxta running again and set up a connection this way to polo.

The results were nothing short of astounding. Extremely good quality voice through an alpha wireless connection out through our link in Sydney to a guy in the US.

Once they get a few little nits out of it, this is looking very nice.

Technorati Tag: Solaris

^{1. Sun Wide Area Network}

Posted at 07:22PM Mar 23, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[1]

Oh My God

I just saw Chris' blog entry on my hit stats.

The wierd thing is that until my last entry about Lucy, I had not written anything in more than a week (I've been swamped prior to being away looking after Lucy).

Looking now, I see that Jonathan is back in front of me, but I still have more than 4200 hits!

Besides, getting more hits than Jonathan is not a CLM¹ is it?

No it's not, Jonathan's actually a pretty nice guy.

Update

Looks like I'm not that popular really. It was referrer spam. I've removed them from my referers for today. You would think that one day they might wake up and realise that I don't list my referers any more.

Posted at 10:38AM Mar 18, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Lucy is feeling better

I've spent most of this week on carer's leave.

Monday night we took Lucy into hospital (Wyong), as she had an incredibly bad cough.

The night staff at Wyong were great.

On initial examination, the doctors were very concerned as it looked like she had some kind of chest infection that looked like the onset of pneumonia.

Lucy spent most of that night on oxygen and hourly ventolin, all provided by a mask. She really did not like the ventolin as it was steamy and it got in her eyes, so her solution was to cover her eyes with a dry flanel.

At about 6am the next morning they organised for an ambulance to transfer her to the children's ward at Gosford (as in spite of all of the state politicians running around sayng how they have been doing wonderful things for Wyong Hospital, it still lacks a children's ward!!!).

She spent all of Tuesday at Gosford (who also had wonderful staff through all shifts). What we really appreciated was that Gosford Children's Ward provides a place (with beds) for one parent to stay free of charge so they can be near their children. Lyn stayed. I think her presence comforted both Lyn and Lucy as Lyn was not required through the night.

Lucy spent a lot of time in the craft/play room and enjoyed that part of her stay very much.

She came home after lunch on Wednesday and is on a decreasing schedule of ventolin through a spacer for the next week.

She went to School yesterday, but both her and Jake were still asleep about 8:30 this morning, so Lyn decided to let them both sleep it out. Lucy is still pretty hyper from all of that ventolin and (though I think he wouldn't admit it) I think Jake was pretty worried about her.

Unfortunately for Lucy, she is not to play sport for a week, so she can only watch the first soccer game of the year that she and Jake were supposed to be playing tomorrow.

My heartfelt thanks to the staff of both Wyong and Gosford Hospitals for nursing my special little girl back to health.

Posted at 10:23AM Mar 18, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Kids  | 

Welcome to Darren Reed

I noticed that Darren Reed (of ipf and various other useful things fame) was working for us a few weeks back, but wasn't going to say anything until Darren himself made his presence known, and I should have guessed that he would be blogging under the login of avalon.

Again, welcome both to Sun and to the blogging community.

I've interacted with Darren for quite some time now (on and off) though I'd be surprised if he remembered some of the earlier stuff, harking back to the days of effnet irc in various universities along with ircII (which I still use a bit).

I look forward to reading what you have to say and looking at what you're working on.

Alan.

Posted at 01:18PM Mar 14, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

A really organized pile

I was reading through Bryan's tips and tricks for dtrace that he published today and noticed the page recommending folk not to compile on x86 with -omit-frame-pointer (for gcc) or -x04 for (our compilers). The page (42 oddly enough) looks something like:

Later today, watching the #solaris channel in irc on freenet, I saw the following quote, made in regard to something totally unrelated, but seems to fit soooo well.

It's not really a stack, more of a really organized pile

Thank you to g4lt-mordant for that gem.

Technorati Tag: Solaris

Posted at 03:20PM Mar 01, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  | 

Fixing Mozilla on Solaris Express 2/05

I mentioned the other day that there was a well used script that does not (yet) deal with uname -r returning 5.10.1.

You guessed it, the script in question is /usr/sfw/bin/mozilla.

The bug¹ has the effect that if you double click on the mozilla icon, nothing happens. If you try to run mozilla, you get it telling you:

    Mozilla 1.7 requires Solaris 8 or later

Fortunately this is pretty easy to fix.

On lines 217-218 of /usr/sfw/bin/mozilla, you will see the following:

        case "$OS_VERSION" in
        "5.8" | "5.9" | "5.10" ) ;;

Simply change this to read :

        case "$OS_VERSION" in
        "5.8" | "5.9" | "5.10" | "5.10.1") ;;

I believe the real fix will be to remove this code entirely and has been done for build 10.

Technorati Tag: Solaris

Posted at 09:17AM Mar 01, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris Express  |