Posts tagged with: solaris

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 ►

Links of interest for 26 Jul 2010 - 6 Aug 2010: Using Oracle® Solaris 10 to Overcome Security Challenges - A great whitepaper that briefly explains and demonstrates a lot of the great security features Solaris has. This isn't a HOWTO, but more of a "look what we can do document". Well worth a read, even if you are a seasoned Solaris expert - you may just find a "I didn't know that" moment. Official Google Blog: Update on Google Wave - Good-bye Wave. I used you once to see what the fuss was all about and then promptly forgot... Continue reading ►

July this year saw Solaris starting to comply with Oracle's standard practice of releasing quarterly Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) containing security fixes. Unfortunately, it also saw Solaris complying with Oracle's policy to not actually provide a correlation between CVE numbers and the corresponding patches in the CPU itself (CPU July 2010). This naturally caused a lot of uproar in the Solaris install base with a lot of big customers very upset. Oracle have listened and a CVE-to-Patch list has now been released for the July 2010 CPU. Apparently the actual CPU will be updated to reflect this mapping too, ... 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 ►

Links of interest for 6 Jul 2010 - 23 Jul 2010: Oracle Solaris Support on HP Proliant and BladeServers - c0t0d0s0.org - I think Oracle may have seen the light and realised there's actually good money in offering Solaris support on 3rd party hardware. Time will tell if this is extended to other vendors. /dev/dump: Please Be Patient - Be patient folks. Looks like we'll be hearing a bit more from Oracle re OpenSolaris in early August. WordPress And Thesis Go To Battle. Mullenweg May Sue. - The outcome of this will be interesting and certainly tests the interpretation of... 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 ►

Links of interest for 20 May 2010 - 30 Jun 2010: Sun’s Lost Intel-Chip Killer - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - So that's why Sun bought Montalvo. Somehow I don't think Sun would have been able to make the return on these had they come to market, but nice to know Sun's untold ambitions are coming to light. LCA: How to destroy your community [LWN.net] - Oh how true. Why the Digital Economy Act simply won't work - I think Cory Doctorow sums it up beautifully at the end... "Once you swallow a spider to catch a fly, you're on... Continue reading ►

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 9 Mar 2010 - 21 Apr 2010: C language inventor spurns Google's language exam - Hey, maybe Google has a point, maybe Ken's gone crazy and forgotten everything, but highly unlikely. Apache Foundation Hit by Targeted XSS Attack - Wow!! What a detailed account of what happened. It's quite refreshing to see such an open account of a system hack. Nobody Killed OpenSolaris — Stop the FUD! - Nice to see someone outside of Sun/Oracle is actually seeing sense. Multicore requires OS rework, Windows architect advises - Errmm, I must be missing something here: doesn't Solaris... Continue reading ►