Posts tagged with: software

Oracle's silence on the future of OpenSolaris planted the seeds of thought on the future of OpenSolaris and brought on a lot of speculation. Well, last week an email was leaked which confirmed everyone's fears: OpenSolaris is dead. We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis. [...] ... Continue reading ►

Last night saw quite a significant announcement for the OpenSolaris community: the announcement of Illumos. We first got a whiff of something brewing in the pipes last week when an email was sent to opensolaris-announce advertising the announcement of something called Illumos. Speculation ran rife about the possibility of what Illumos would be with many guessing it would be a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris based distribution. Well, last night we found out that it's neither. Illumos is in fact a "downstream" project to create a fully open-source-licensed, independently run version of the OpenSolaris operating system and networking ... Continue reading ►

Yesterday Oracle announced that Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. What wasn't clear from this was how this affects other vendors. Well, I can confirm this offering covers ALL Solaris certified non-Sun hardware that is listed on the HCL too, regardless of the manufacturer. A quick glance of the HCL shows it covers a broad selection of HP, Dell, IBM, and Fujitsu systems among others. If you have a system that isn't on the list, and you need support for it, contact the vendor of the ... Continue reading ►

I've just noticed a new PSARC case, PSARC 2010/291: zonestat, that I know a lot of people will find very very useful. To quote the summary from the PSARC: This fast-track proposes the addition of a command line tool to facilitate the observation of system resources consumed by Solaris Zones. The tool is specifically designed to observe the following: 1. Memory and cpu utilization of zones. 2. Utilization of resource control limits. 3. Resource utilization versus physical resources and versus configured limits. 4. Various cpu-related resource partitioning schemes, such as processor sets, pools, fair share scheduler, and cpu-caps. 5. Total... Continue reading ►

For years I've been running Firefox from my home directory with a symlink in ${HOME}/.mozilla/plugins pointing to for /usr/java/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so the Java plugin. Whilst this has worked, it's been no where near the pain free experience that using the Java plugin on Windows and Mac OS X is. Until now. The other day I discovered that my Java plugin was no longer working and Firefox wasn't showing it in the about:plugins list either. A bit of research soon revealed the cause: I'd just upgraded to Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 3.6 dropped support for this old style plugin in favour of the ... Continue reading ►

It's amazing what you discover whilst working a weekend shift with a bit of time to spare. Whilst perusing through the shell scripts used as part of the Sun in-house built VPN solution (Oracle are giving it the chop in favour of Cisco SSL AnyConnect client which doesn't officially work on Solaris x86 - it does with the help of openconnect though ;-) ), I discovered a little easter egg in ping(1M). Fire up a terminal and ping a host: $ ping google.com google.com is alive $ Nothing fancy there and exactly as I expected. However, if you're a Linux/Mac... Continue reading ►

I haven't seen one of these Microsoft bashing videos in a long time...

Many people don't run the SSH that comes with Solaris 9 and later on their Solaris hosts, instead opting for OpenSSH or one of Tectia's SSH products. Some don't like SunSSH's versioning, as it makes it hard to determine if SunSSH is vulnerable to the same issues as OpenSSH (most often it's not or the issue has already been addressed), others rely on features on OpenSSH that haven't made it into SunSSH (there aren't many) and then there are those who's corporate guidelines only allow for a third party solution - probably for uniformity across platforms. Whatever the reason, all of these people are security conscious so they may also have an auditing (aka BSM) requirement too, and this is where the problem comes to light: they soon discover that it appears that not all events are being recorded for users who connect via this third party SSH software. Thankfully it's easy to get OpenSSH working with Solaris auditing thanks to the very generous code contributions made by Sun to the OpenSSH community, way back in 2001, that were finally included in OpenSSH 4.0 and later. However, despite these contributions, people still miss the details on getting BSM working as they expect and this is what I'll address here. Continue reading ►

As with Linux, Firefox and Thunderbird are available for Solaris and OpenSolaris in a variety of forms: supplied with the OS, installed separately from a pkg and installed separately from a tarball (both available from Mozilla.org). Of these, the only way you can get any sort of automatic update is with the first option: via an OS update and this tends to lag behind the available releases by quite some margin. Well, that's about to change, at least for some people. I'll get straight into the technical details and leave the background behind all of this to the very end. This post and the accompanying code was inspired by this article on Mozilla Developer Center. Update: Ooops, it would seem the automatic update DOES work by default for the tarball downloads, it just doesn't offer an automatic upgrade between 3.5.x and 3.6.x as I was testing. I'll leave the rest of this post as is as an "education" for those wanting to implement their own internal crude update system. Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 22 Apr 2010 - 19 May 2010: Chrome Incognito Tracks Visited Sites - Lewis showed me this yesterday morning before posting this blog post. Guess incognito mode isn't as forgetful as you thought. Funny Photoshop Crash Reports - It's amazing what people write in these crash reports. Oracle on ZFS Whitepaper - Quite a useful whitepaper on running Oracle on ZFS. Warning, it's a PDF. Special Report: Can That Guy in Ironman 2 Whip IBM in Real Life? - Some great hard hitting quotes from Larry Ellison explaining exactly why Sun became such an easy takeover... Continue reading ►