http://www.lildude.co.uk Solaris, Unix, Linux, PHP, Webdev, etc; It's all discussed here Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:45:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/installing-the-recommended-patch-cluster-with-zones-parallel-patching/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/howto-use-xclipboard-with-gnome/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/solaris-zones-parallel-patching/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/the-key-to-live-upgrade-success/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/opensolaris-200906-has-been-released/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/links-for-12-may-2009-1-jun-2009/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/updating-to-opensolaris-200906/ 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". http://www.lildude.co.uk/chmod-without-execute-permissions/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/hb-cumulus-13/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/the-sun-name-will-remain/ 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). http://www.lildude.co.uk/habari-061-released/ 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, ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/oracle-wont-abandon-sparc-says-ellison/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/ss7000-simulator-on-virtualbox/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/links-for-6-apr-2009-3-may-2009/ 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. http://www.lildude.co.uk/solaris-10-509-available-for-download/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/ubuntu-904-jaunty-jackalope-now-available/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/larry-ellison-to-become-my-new-big-boss/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/ultra-20-graphics-card-not-seen-opensolaris-snv_108-and-later/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/howto-update-ultra-20-bios-from-a-usb-stick/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/ssh-attacks-going-strong/ 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: This latest release of Habari contains some ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/habari-06-now-available/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/links-for-25-mar-2009-2-apr-2009/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/sun-modular-data-centre-in-simulated-earthquake/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/links-for-15-mar-2009-24-mar-2009/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/howto-install-habari-on-mac-os-x-leopard-from-scratch/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/zsh-prompt-colours-in-opensolaris-snv_109-and-later/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/jonathan-schwartz-lets-you-know-how-sun-ticks/ 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. ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/ibm-in-talks-to-buy-sun-huh/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/links-for-13-feb-2009-10-mar-2009/ 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 ... http://www.lildude.co.uk/opensolaris-snv_108-on-virtualbox/