Col’s Tech Stuff

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here recently folks. I haven’t been completely offline and neglecting this and my other sites, I’ve just been lacking the motivation to write or get involved due to recent events on the home front.

Sadly, February has been a very tough month for my wife and I: our baby daughter, Lara, unfortunately didn’t make it through the open heart surgery she had to undergo in order to rectify two congenital heart defects. I’m not going to go into the details here but if you’re interested, I will be posting a series of posts, building up to my daughter’s funeral on 12 March, on my main site. Suffice to say we were devastated and completely knocked for six by this, even though we’d known about the heart condition before she was born. The loss of a child is something you really can’t prepare yourself for no matter how much forewarning you received.

Oh yes, I’m now officially an Oracle employee. The UK integration date was yesterday and I’ve been through my “welcome” and “orientation” meetings (what a way to kill 4 hours). We’re not quite running as Oracle, but give it a bit of time and you’ll hardly notice the difference .

I’ve got a todo list of posts and techie things to do as long as my arm, so hopefully some more useful content will be coming soon.

Links of interest for 27 Jan 2010 - 14 Feb 2010:

• eWEEK’s Top 25 Technologies Of The Decade - Including Solaris 10 - "During the latter half of '00s, Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 sat at the leading edge of operating system technologies, with unique capabilities that include Containers virtualisation, Dtrace system instrumentation and the ZFS file system. Solaris 10 also helped put a stamp of inevitability on the x86-64 architecture and on the open-source-as-a-platform licensing strategy."
• UK Govt Say “No Evidence” IE is Less Secure - Or more precisely, "There is no evidence that moving from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure." Probably true, but find me ONE government department, other than the techies themselves, running a fully patched version of Windows and IE. That's where the problem is. Large companies and governments don't like to change things without testing them first, often for 3 - 6 months before rolling them out.
• H.264 has 900 Patents!!! - Wow!!! If ever there was something that would scare you off using something free, then this is it. With 900 patents for a single bit of technology, that's a lot of potential for frivolous litigation. Now you know why Mozilla are fighting against implementing H.264 in Firefox.
• HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web - A very good (and long) article on why we really don't want H.264 to become the common codec for HTML5 video.
• With Sun, Oracle Aims At Giants - NYTimes.com - Sun has wonderful engineering, but they didnt seem to like selling very much, Mr. Ellison said. The partner model was disastrous, and we are immediately changing that. Wow!!! Now why didn't someone at Sun realise this years ago?

Well folks, as you’ve no doubt already read in the press (Oracle’s office news), Sun Microsystems ceased to exist as a separate legal entity yesterday. Sun Microsystems is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.

And to mark the end of the era, I took a snapshot of the stock price and graph over Sun’s history…

Hmmm, I wonder when the Dot Com boom was

It’s such a shame to see such an innovative company being swallowed up, but as Larry Ellison (I think, but I could be wrong) pointed out: Sun was brilliant at innovating, just not so good at selling. If Oracle’s commitments to investing in R&D continue over the long term, I think we may finally see Sun innovations becoming noticed by the world at large as-and-when they happen and actually making someone (Oracle) a shed load of money, and who knows, maybe Oracle WILL become the new IBM.

What is quite impressive is the speed at which Oracle is working to integrate Sun into their business. The sun.com home page already redirects to oracle.com and the old Sun product pages have taken on an Oracle look in as much as logos and some colours have all be updated to those used by Oracle. My mailbox is also slowly filling up with emails from Oracle I suppose this isn’t really too surprising given the number of acquisitions Oracle has performed and their reputation for wrapping things up quickly and efficiently.

From my initial investigations, and this is purely speculatory based on the Oracle/Sun sites, it looks like Oracle will be keeping the Sun brand name for all hardware, but all software will become known as “Oracle <whatever>”, for example Solaris is now “Oracle Solaris“.

Anyway, as a Sun employee (I can’t call myself an Oracle employee just yet), I’m looking forward to the integration and the ride ahead. Provided Oracle keeps it’s promises, cuts the ineffectual people and products from Sun and succeeds in making this acquisition a profitable one, I think we (the Oracle we) will have a rosy and very prosperous future. Watch out IBM.

Looks like Google have been caught napping slightly. Firefox 3.6 has been in development for while and has been out for nearly a week now and we still don’t have an officially compatible version of the Google Page Speed extension.

Well, all is not lost, it appears Page Speed continues to work correctly and as expected in Firefox 3.6. All you need to do is bump the “em:maxVersion” number in the install.rdf file included in the extension. I’ve set this to 3.6.* and the extension works a treat.

If you already have the plugin installed, you’ll just need to modify this file in the extension directory in the profile directory on your system. If you don’t have the extension installed already, you’ll need to unpack the extension (it’s a zip file), make the change, repackage the extension (zip up the files with a .xpi extension) and try installing again.

Links of interest for 6 Jan 2010 - 26 Jan 2010:

• Internal Memo: Sun CEO Jon Schwartz to Staff - I didn't noticed this (I got the original), but these guys did: a little hidden message in Jon's memo. Note how it doesn't apply to the whole memo. Seems consistent with his efforts as a CEO: He started off well and then couldn't be bothered to finish what he started.
• EUROPA - Press Releases - Mergers: Commission clears Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems - And the official press release.
• Oracle wins unconditional EU approval for Sun buy - It's taken long enough, but finally the EU have approved the deal. I think things will start to move very quickly now.
• Pitfalls of Benchmarking Flash with dd(1M) : Lisa Noordergraaf - A great simple illustration of why dd(1M) really isn't a good tool for benchmarking disk performance.
• Spitting ZFS Mirrors - Woohoo!! Finally a highly sought after feature - zfs splitting - has made it into ZFS as of snv_131. Mark provides a bit more insight into this forth coming functionality.

I’ve just released the next revision of HB-Cumulus - rev 1.5.

This release now takes full advantage of the new tags functionality in the latest Habari SVN code and also now uses SWFObject 2.2 for the embedding in “non-compatibility” (ie the default) mode.

All the other changes are minor and include things like better HTML validation, formatting of the code itself and an update to the tagcloud flash file itself.

Downloads are on the HB-Cumulus project page.

As this is a new release, I’ve closed comments on the 1.4 post. If you encounter any problems, please ensure you update to rev 1.5 and if the problem still exists, leave a comment here.

I recently purchased a 1/4GB Joyent Accelerator account (aka zone) and thought as I’ve got full control of what I run, I’ll try the Lighttpd (1.4.22) and PHP FastCGI (5.2.9) combination for my website hosting. Whilst this worked great and performance was pretty impressive, I’m not too impressed with the memory consumption of the PHP FastCGI processes.

My accelerator is limited to 256MB and I was finding I was soon reaching this limit with each php-cgi process consuming at least 20MB, often with one consuming over 100MB!!!. At one stage this got so bad that I couldn’t even login so had to get Joyent to reboot my zone.

I’ve tried several things to try and reduce the memory usage including reducing the number of child processes (PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN) to 4 and lowering the number of requests for each process (PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS) down to 400 and the problem continued. I’ve also tried using OpenSolaris resource controls and whilst this stops the entire zone’s memory from being hogged by the php-cgi processes, it doesn’t stop the copious amounts of memory being munched by these processes.

For those interested, my fastcgi.server config section is as follows:

fastcgi.server =  ( ".php" =>
                     ( "localhost" =>
                       (
                         "socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
                         "bin-path" => "/opt/local/bin/php-cgi",
                         "max-procs" => 1,
                         "bin-environment" => (
                                "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
                                "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "400"
                                ),
                         "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable"
                       )
                     )
                  )

max-procs is set to 1 as I was using eAccelerator.

Now, I know I can setup a cronjob to kill off these large processes on a regular basis, but this isn’t a solution: it’s a workaround or more precisely a hack.

So my question is: how on earth do people run with Lighttpd and PHP FastCGI in a constrained production environment without resorting to hacks to limit what appears to be php-cgi leaking memory?

I’ve resorted to using Apache and mod_php and as expected, memory usage has been perfectly acceptable for over a week now (Lighty/PHP FastCGI ran out of memory at least once a day).

Woohoo!!! Finally, the EU has given Oracle the thumbs-up for their purchase of Sun…

Larry Ellison’s Oracle won an all-clear from Europe’s top antitrust official to proceed with its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems after reaching a verbal agreement to protect a piece of software at the heart of a months-long dispute.

The final approval is due mid-January. I think the EU have done the right thing by approving this deal, not only because I’m a Sun employee (speaking only for myself), but also for the sake of Sun’s customers.

Did you know you can now upgrade both VxVM AND Solaris using Live Upgrade without reverting to underlying devices? I didn’t, until today when I discovered a document on exactly this topic from Symantec: Upgrading VxVM and/or Solaris using Live Upgrade.

From what I can see in this document, it appears VxVM now comes with it’s own wrapper scripts for the standard Live Upgrade called vxlustart and vxlufinish respectively. BOTH commands are supplied on the VxVM 5.0 (and later media) and they both require and expect the native Live Upgrade pkgs and patches to be already applied to the system you’re upgrading.

The whole live upgrade process is then performed using the vxlustart and vxlufinish scripts with no direct calling of the native commands by the admin. From an administrator’s point of view, this is a good thing, but watch out when things go wrong as I suspect some finger pointing may start to take place.

Naturally, as these scripts are supplied by Symantec, Symantec would be the ones to offer support if anything goes wrong.