Col's Tech Stuff

Installing the Recommended Patch Cluster With Zones Parallel Patching

Colin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:45:42 +0000

As promised on Friday, I’ve taken the plunge and tested applying the latest patch cluster to a fresh Solaris 10u5 installation running 10 zones using the new zones parallel patching feature.

To speed things up and to try and prevent any problems I performed the following steps:

Jumpstarted the OS (SUNWCuser cluster)
Applied patches 125555-04 and 119254-66 (gives us the parallel functionality)
Created a basic sparse-root zone without any networking
Cloned the zone 9 more times
Create an alternate BE using live upgrade so I had two identical boot environments

Once I had the machine setup, I booted into single user mode (so all zones will be in the “installed” state) and set off the first cluster installation using the default options (ie no parallel application).

I then rebooted into single user mode on the alternate boot environment, set num_proc to 10 and applied the patch cluster again.

How’s this for a significant difference in time:

Read the rest of Installing the Recommended Patch Cluster With Zones Parallel Patching (92 words)

HOWTO: Use xclipboard With Gnome

Colin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:27:45 +0000

I work with a couple of guys who are quite stuck in their ways and are quite reliant on old tools, one of which is xclipboard(1).

Unfortunately, Gnome comes with it’s own clipboard manager, so when you try to run xclipboard, you get the following:

$ xclipboard
Error: another clipboard is already running
$

Of course, ps(1M) will show no clipboard related processes running. This is because the functionality is performed by Gnome itself, I believe, as part of the functionality of gnome-settings-daemon.

One of my colleagues gave me the challenge of getting xclipboard working on Gnome on OpenSolaris/Nevada, ie Gnome 2.6, and I found it quite easy to do in the end.

The trick is to tell Gnome not to perform this functionality anymore as follows:

Read the rest of HOWTO: Use xclipboard With Gnome (149 words)

Solaris Zones Parallel Patching

Colin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:35:21 +0000

If you’re running a fair few non-global zones on Solaris 10, you’ll know full well how painfully slow the patching process is. Well, I’m please to say “not any more”.

The Zones Parallel Patching feature was officially released on Tuesday and is contained in the latest Solaris 10 patch utilities patch, 119254-66 (SPARC) and 119255-66 (x86).

Getting the functionality is simple: just apply the patch as you would any other patch. Taking advantage of it is a different thing.

By default the behaviour is as before: NO parallel patching takes place. But it’s easily changed by setting “num_proc” to the number of non-global zones to be patched in parallel in the /etc/patch/pdo.conf file.

Prior to this feature, each non-global zone was patched sequentially. With this feature invoked, the global zone continues to be patched first, but then the non-global zones can be patched in parallel, leading to significant performance gains in patching operations on zones systems.

While the performance gain is dependent on a number of factors, including the number of non-global zones, the number of on-line CPUs, the speed of the system, the I/O configuration of the system, etc., a significant performance gain (up to 300% has been reported) can be expected for patching the non-global zones.

Read the rest of Solaris Zones Parallel Patching (781 words)

The Key to Live Upgrade Success

Colin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:28:26 +0000

I think one of the best features of Solaris is the Live Upgrade mechanism. This really useful feature can be used for upgrading and patching with very little impact on the server. This means you can patch or upgrade your production system, whilst it’s still in production, and only schedule a short outage for the reboot needed to activate the new patched/upgraded environment. Live upgrade also has the added benefit that you can roll back to a known good boot environment in the event something goes wrong.

Sadly, it’s not always a bed of roses when it comes to using live upgrade as things change with patches and new bugs are discovered and fixed, however most problems can be easily avoided with a little bit of pre-planning.

Read the rest of The Key to Live Upgrade Success (353 words)

OpenSolaris 2009.06 Has Been Released

Colin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:08:11 +0000

I was a little early this morning with my post about upgrading as technically OpenSolaris 2009.06 hadn’t been released. Well it has now. Check out the official release announcement for a different “What’s New and links to the various downloads.

Oh yes, and SPARC support is now officially included too.

Links for 12 May 2009 - 1 Jun 2009

Colin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:00:27 +0000

Links of interest for 12 May 2009 - 1 Jun 2009:

Sun Security Toolkit at OpenSolaris.org - The SST (aka JASS) is now open source (under CDDL) and available for OpenSolaris too.
Parallel Patching for Solaris 10 - Chris Armes’s Weblog - This is a godsend if you've got a system with a lot of zones that needs patching. You can expect patch for patchadd for this sometime in June so you can get parallel patching before S10u8
What’s New in OpenSolaris 2009.06 - The presentation slides used by Peter Dennis at Community One
Sun seeks to build world’s biggest App Store around Java - Now this would be brilliant if Sun manages to pull it off. It may start off being Windows only to start off with, but as it's Java, there's no good reason it can't become available for OS X, Linux or even OpenSolaris.
Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack - What a genius idea.

Updating to OpenSolaris 2009.06

Colin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:02:47 +0000

The pkg repositories have now been updated to included the 2009.06 pkgs (What’s New preso - PDF). There is no need to perform a clean install, you can just use the Update Manager GUI to update your OpenSolaris 2008.11 release to 2009.06.

There is one teeny weeny issue that you may encounter - the Update Manager GUI may tell you that there are no new pkgs available. Sadly, the solution isn’t clear or intuitive from the GUI: you need to update the SUNWipkg pkg first. The CLI is clearer about this and tells you that you need to update this pkg when you attempt to upgrade using “pfexec pkg image-update”.

So to update via the GUI, quickly fire up a terminal and run:

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg

This will update the package tool and once complete, you can then return to the Update Manager GUI to perform the upgrade.

Thanks to the beauty of ZFS and OpenSolaris’s upgrade procedure, a new boot environment will be created, updated and made the default BE (only if the upgrade is successful). Your old boot environment will still be available if you want to go back at a later stage.

I’ve you’ve been using the dev repositories, you’re not likely to hit this issue now as you would have hit it in the past already. I believe this issue is now resolved too.

Chmod Without Execute Permissions

Colin — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:45:16 +0000

This one made us laugh today: someone made a silly mistake and removed execute permissions from chmod(1M). Oooops.

Thankfully, it was on Solaris so it’s easy enough to rectify thanks to “pkgchk -f”.

HB-Cumulus 1.3

Colin — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:30:30 +0000

I’ve just pushed out a new revision of HB-Cumulus. This isn’t a major update, rather another maintenance update in which I’ve:

Updated tagcloud.swf to that provided with WP-Cumulus 1.20, which includes the following relevant fixes:
“Fixed the mouse pointer not changing to a hand when hovering tags.”
“Adds Turkish language support to the Flash movie.”
Like the WP-Cumulus plugin, I’ve also added a “Compatibility” option. When this is enabled, the plugin will not use the SWFObject Javascript to embed the Flash.

You can get the latest revision from the HB-Cumulus project page.

As this is a new release, I’ve closed comments on the 1.2 post. If you encounter any problems, please ensure you update to rev 1.3 and if the problem still exists, leave a comment here.

The Sun Name Will Remain

Colin — Wed, 13 May 2009 09:22:00 +0000

Finally the “behind the scenes” details of Sun’s little dating game (ie hawking itself off) have been made public in the proxy statement Sun is required to file as part of the acquisition.

The Register gives a summarized explanation of the shenanigans if you don’t want to read through the whoooole looooong proxy report.

One thing that is encouraging about this disclosure is Oracle will effectively become Sun’s sugar daddy as the following question and answer states:

Q: What is the transaction?

A: Sun and Oracle have entered into a definitive agreement pursuant to which, subject to the terms and conditions of the merger agreement, Oracle will acquire Sun through the merger of a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle with and into Sun. Sun will be the surviving corporation (which we refer to as the surviving corporation) in the merger and will continue as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.

This is also encouraging and I hope it remains this way indefinitely. This should allow Sun to continue innovating like it has for all these years, but now with a firm hand holding onto the purse strings (and hopefully having a hand in getting rid of some of the cruft in Sun’s upper management).

I suspected this would be the case as the Sun name and brand is still very valuable and powerful and Oracle can now use both brands to it’s full advantage. Time will tell how well this works.

Habari 0.6.1 Released

Colin — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:41:46 +0000

Habari 0.6.1 has just been released. It’s only a minor update, but does include some relatively significant fixes, including the “re-introduction” of Postgres support (it wasn’t really removed before, just not updated. It is now).

Oracle Won’t Abandon SPARC, Says Ellison

Colin — Fri, 08 May 2009 09:04:31 +0000

In an interview (PDF) just posted on the Oracle site, Larry Ellison confirms his commitment to SPARC…

Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa. For example, SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not just a green issue, it’s an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy their computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines.

This is really encouraging for both Sun employees and Sun customers. I suspect we may be seeing Rock coming to fruition after all, and Oracle’s software will run like a dream on it.

SS7000 Simulator On Virtualbox

Colin — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:32:40 +0000

The Sun Storage 7000 simulator has just been updated to reflect the changes introduced in the 2009.Q2.0.0 release of the “firmware” and at the same time a Virtualbox image of the simulator has been released (get it here)

I’ve been waiting for this for a while as I don’t have VMWare and didn’t really want to go that route considering Virtualbox is just as good, if not better (I have to say that ). Anyway, thanks to Virtualbox’s new ability to support OVF and host-only networking (as of 2.2.2), a simulator image for Virtualbox is possible.

I’ve not played with it much, yet, but the simulated setup of the appliance is amazingly simple. It’s no wonder it’s the “faster ever ramping product in Sun’s storage product portfolio“.

Links for 6 Apr 2009 - 3 May 2009

Colin — Sun, 03 May 2009 11:00:28 +0000

Links of interest for 6 Apr 2009 - 3 May 2009:

New Time Slider features coming up in OpenSolaris 2009.06 - Some useful and impressive changes are coming to TimeSlider. Time Slider is definitely starting to eclipse OS X’s Time Machine in over-all functionality, and in my opinion, usefulness.
ZFS Encrypted Backup to S3 - Now you can backup your ZFS filesystems directly to Amazon S3 or the Sun Cloud Storage. No GUI yet, but give it time and I reckon TimeSlider will have this functionality working perfectly.
OpenSolaris Live USB Creator (Windows/.NET) ‎(PID0.ORG DevZone)‎ - Finally, a Live USB creator for our friends on Windows.
The Pirate Bay verdict: guilty, with jail time - Round 1: PB 0 - Courts 1. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves over time. It’ll also be interesting to see how the BitTorrent protocol will change or if a new more de-centralised protocol will emerge from this.
Solutions for tracing UNIX applications - Quite a good and lengthy article on tracing applications on UNIX. I think a bit more detail and emphasis could have been put in DTrace, but given this is an IBM article and AIX/Linux don’t have DTrace, it’s understandable why they haven’t.

Solaris 10 5/09 Available for Download

Colin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:52:10 +0000

Oooooo, this one slipped out onto the public download servers a little early. It’s still April, but Solaris 10 5/09 is now available for download.

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Now Available

Colin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:01:40 +0000

Whilst I’m primarily a Solaris/OpenSolaris man, I do like to keep myself in touch with the Linux world - partly out of necessity and partly out of curiosity. I run Ubuntu (sticking with my African roots and because it’s the best distro I’ve used) on my very very very old laptop (need) and also within VirtualBox on my Mac (curiosity).

Well, it’s that time of year again: it’s time to update to the latest and greatest as Jaunty Jackalope is now ready for all to download, install and enjoy.

Along with the usual latest and greatest features, I’m particularly interested in seeing if a) the Ubuntu Netbook Remix edition actually installs on my aging laptop (it’s not a netbook) and b) how well it runs if it does - I currently use Xubuntu as Gnome is a bit sluggish on the old girl, and I don’t like KDE.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Larry Ellison to Become My New Big Boss

Colin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:03:47 +0000

If all goes well, it looks like Larry Ellison is soon to become my new Big Boss following the news that Oracle has agreed to buy Sun Microsystems for the sum of $9.50 a share (I got this email too).

I must say I’m a lot more comfortable with the idea of Oracle, a software company, acquiring Sun than I was with the idea IBM. I’ve never liked the way IBM does business - maybe this is a hand-me-down from my father who used to work for ICL many years ago.

Anyway, Oracle has quite a reputation for integrating acquisitions quickly so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly this gets through all the legal ramifications and for Sun to become Oracle (or Sunacle?) in day-to-day business. It’ll also be interesting to see what they do with Sun’s land assets. Whilst I like my current office in Camberley, the trip to Reading where Oracle UK HQ is, is a much easier drive.

It’ll also be very interesting to see the direction Oracle takes things like Java, Solaris/OpenSolaris and Sun’s hardware line. Only time will tell.

Ultra 20 Graphics Card Not Seen OpenSolaris snv_108 and Later

Colin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 11:12:58 +0000

Following a recent update to snv_108, I could no longer get any graphics output on my Ultra 20 M2 and subsequent updates weren’t helping either. For some reason the graphics card (onboard nVidia Quadro FX 560) was not being seen correctly by the OS and the only indication of a problem was the following in the /var/log/Xorg.log.0:

Read the rest of Ultra 20 Graphics Card Not Seen OpenSolaris snv_108 and Later (479 words)

HOWTO: Update Ultra 20 BIOS From a USB Stick

Colin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 11:01:28 +0000

Updating the firmware on an Ultra 20 is a really simple matter: download the “Tools and Drivers” ISO image, burn it to DVD (as it’s about 1.3GB), boot from the DVD and select option 2 to perform the update.

However, it very quickly becomes way more complicated if you don’t have a DVD burner or spare DVD-R, or even a DVD drive. So what other option do you have? Boot CD? Yes, but its way too complicated for the time and effort. Boot Network? Ditto. Boot USB? Bingo!!!

Read the rest of HOWTO: Update Ultra 20 BIOS From a USB Stick (284 words)

SSH Attacks Going Strong

Colin — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 07:59:48 +0000

From the diary of ISC yesterday:

While I’m aware that ISC readers probably don’t have to be told, let’s nevertheless try again to get the word out: If you are running any SSH server open to the Internet, and your usernames and passwords aren’t at least 8 characters or so, your box is either owned by now, or about to be. It doesn’t matter one bit what sort of device it is - those who run these scans have proven to be equally apt at taking over a Cisco router as they are at subverting an iMac.

My own router records led me to believe there has been a marked increase in SSH bruteforce attempts quite some time ago, so I’ve disabled all internet facing SSH and only enable it, with very limited IP address access, if and when I need it.

If you’re allowing SSH access to your network, it’s definitely time you considered how secure it really is, and if you really need it. Botnets are getting bigger and quicker and may soon own you if you’re not careful.

Habari 0.6 Now Available

Colin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:53:16 +0000

The latest stable build of Habari was pushed out the doors last night and is now available for download.

There have quite a significant number of changes and improvements on the previous stable release (0.5.2) which are documented as follows in the release notes:

Read the rest of Habari 0.6 Now Available (406 words)

Links for 25 Mar 2009 - 2 Apr 2009

Colin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:00:05 +0000

Links of interest for 25 Mar 2009 - 2 Apr 2009:

Toshiba OpenSolaris Laptops - You can now get your hands on the much touted Opensolaris Toshiba laptops. Sadly, it#039;s US only at the mo with UK availability expected sometime in May 2009. I guess I#039;ll have to wait a bit, but it#039;ll be good to start hearing the reviews to see how these things run.
Accelerated Patching of Zoned Systems - Woohooo!!!! Patching of systems with zones is about to get a lot quicker. Jeff provides some good data here just to whet your appetite in anticipation of the quot;Zones Parallel Patchingquot; (ZPP) patch.
PackageManager for 2009.06 - Some good improvements coming to the pkg manager in the next release of OpenSolaris.
The ChrootDirectory option resynced to SunSSH - After a lot of demanding, SunSSH has finally got the OpenSSH chrootdirectory functionality as of snv_112. Not sure if this will be backported though. Time will tell.
Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.1 Now Available for Solaris 10 x86 - It took long enough. Now Adobe just need to get some parity between the SPARC and x86 releases.

Sun Modular Data Centre In Simulated Earthquake

Colin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:40:26 +0000

Hot on the heels of the news that the The Internet Archive has chosen to deploy one of Sun’s Modular Data Centres (aka Project Blackbox) comes this video showing how it stands up to a simulated 6.7 earthquake.

Now this is pretty impressive. Of course something else is very impressive too: Slashdot is actually coming to the party and actually had this video embedded in one of it’s posts.

Links for 15 Mar 2009 - 24 Mar 2009

Colin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:00:09 +0000

Links of interest for 15 Mar 2009 - 24 Mar 2009:

Internet Archive to unveil massive Wayback Machine data center - Oooo, and it#039;s in a Sun Modular Datacentre (aka Project Blackbox) running Solaris 10 and ZFS.
The ‘IBM buys Sun’ story | Paul Murphy | ZDNet.com - Interesting point of view on what#039;s happening with these rumours. The last paragraph in this article could be the deal breaker though.
Heat Map Analytics - Brendan Gregg and Bryan Cantril have far too much free time. The end of this article has a interesting bit about writing a program that generates artificial workload that allows them to print words in 8 point text Analytics of the Sun Storage 7000 series arrays
Sun to Deploy South Africa’s Largest Supercomputer at the Centre for High Performance Computing - It#039;s quite comforting to hear Sun being selected in my home country. When I was living in SA, Sun was an almost unheard of entity. Good to see things are changing.
TPC Benchmarks Don’t Matter Anymore by Noel Yuhanna - Forrester Research - Welcome to the party. Sun have been saying this for years.

HOWTO: Install Habari on Mac OS X Leopard, From Scratch

Colin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:47:47 +0000

Installing Habari isn’t really that complicated, however getting OS X up and running ready for the installation requires a bit of work.

Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) conveniently comes with Apache 2 and PHP 5, so most of the work in setting up a MAMP server has already been done for you. Sure there are other ways to get a MAMP setup: you can build Apache, MySQL and PHP from sources, you can use MacPorts or you can use pre-built packages like MAMP or XAMPP.

I prefer to use as much of what is supplied with the OS as possible as there’s no point having duplicate applications on a system. It also makes keeping them up-to-date much easier - it becomes Apple’s job, not mine.

Anyway, in order to get all the way through this article there are a couple of requirements:

1. You have XCode installed
2. You’re fairly comfortable in using the command line.

This last requirement isn’t strictly true as I will provide all the commands you need to run anyway.

The rest of this post assumes you’ve not configured PHP, Apache or MySQL on OS X at all yet. If you have, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be able to easily pick things up.

NOTE: There is one caveat with this approach: Apple’s updates may require you to redo any one of the steps below as it may replace files you’ve modified or provide newer incompatible versions of software.

Update: You can find details on installing gd on OS X as a universal binary for 32-bit and 64-bit here.

Read the rest of HOWTO: Install Habari on Mac OS X Leopard, From Scratch (1,435 words)

ZSH Prompt Colours in OpenSolaris snv_109 and Later

Colin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 07:12:39 +0000

I’ve just updated my system to the latest OpenSolaris release (snv_109) and suddenly my ZSH prompt has lost all it’s colours (I use them to clearly distinguish between me and the root user - I’m also a bit of a customisation freak ).

A little bit of research soon revealed that OpenSolaris snv_109 and later now ships with ZSH 4.3.9 in which they changed the prompt colouring scheme, and for the better too as it’s far easier to understand.

Read the rest of ZSH Prompt Colours in OpenSolaris snv_109 and Later (201 words)

Jonathan Schwartz Lets You Know How Sun Ticks

Colin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:30:57 +0000

4 great posts from Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, that bring you up to speed very quickly on where the company is heading and how it intends on making money in the future. Each post includes a video that very closely mirrors the words written in the post.

Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)
Technology Adoption (2 of 4) (this one inadvertently drove more traffic to one of my other posts )
Sun’s Network Innovations (3 of 4)
Sun’s Cloud (4 of 4)

I think this is great work by Jonathan. It’s good to see companies being open with their customers to let them know where they’re going and how they plan on getting there, though still no news on the IBM shopping rumours

IBM In Talks to Buy Sun - Huh?

Colin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:38:22 +0000

I was just checking the Sun share price this morning and nearly had a heart-attack. I noticed the share price had jumped significantly in pre-market trading:

I glanced across to the sidebar in Google finance and it’s awash with stories about IBM being in talks to buy Sun Microsystems. They all reference the same Wall Street Journal article - IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft. To say I’m surprised is an understatement of note.

Read the rest of IBM In Talks to Buy Sun - Huh? (258 words)

Links for 13 Feb 2009 - 10 Mar 2009

Colin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:00:11 +0000

Links of interest for 13 Feb 2009 - 10 Mar 2009:

Speeding to a Halt - Wow!!! OpenSolaris shutdown taken from about 41 seconds to a mere 7. Brilliant work here by Dan Price.
Anatomy of Storage on the GRID - First Joyent, now MediaTemple. It’s great to see large, popular ISPs moving across to OpenSolaris and ZFS to power their grid, hosting and storage offerings.
HP Joins Solaris Community (Live Free or Die) - This is brilliant news, for Sun and all those HP customers running Solaris (and I know of some big banks on this list). Now I can’t name a single large-scale corporate computer vendor who hasn’t joined the Solaris OEM market. Lets hope this turns into some good returns for Sun.
OpenSolaris Build 107 for x86/x64/SPARC now available. - Build 107 now available in the dev repository. Be sure to read this release mail before updating as there are several known issues.
Terabit Ethernet becomes a photonic possibility - Now imagine having your broadband connection running at these speeds.

OpenSolaris snv_108 on VirtualBox

Colin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:52:07 +0000

The OpenSolaris/dev repository was updated yesterday to reflect the changes in snv_108 for both x86/x64 and SPARC platforms (announcement).

I updated my VirtualBox instance this morning, which went without a hitch until it came to rebooting. The OS rebooted without any problems, however it didn’t seem to get beyond the “loading” screen that appears just after Grub. It would however boot quite successfully into multi-user mode when in text-mode. I poked and prodded and for the life of me, I couldn’t find any problems, so I went back to the announcement email and I found the cause of my problems there:

Known issues for users running OpenSolaris as a VirtualBox guest
===============================================================
The Xorg driver included with the VirtualBox Guest Additions is incompatible with the 1.5.3 version of
the Xorg server included in this build. VirtualBox users should remove the VirtualBox guest additions
prior to updating to this build.

Sure enough, removing the guest additions pkg resolved the issue. OpenSolaris now loads the graphical interface within VirtualBox without any issues.

Sadly, I don’t have all the functionality the guest additions provide, but it’s at least it’s usable now. I imagine VirtualBox will be updated soon to include support for this rev of Xorg.