New workstation - Ultra 20

Sun has just announced Ultra 20 Opteron based workstation. Standard configuration is priced at 895$ with Opteron 144, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, DVD with 3 year warranty. More equipped models are also available - standard configurations can be found here. Architecture overview and some comparison to w1100z can be found here.

IBM loves Solaris after all

Looks like IBM and Sun have an agreement, finally!

"Big Blue will bring versions of its WebSphere Java software, DB2 database, Rational developer tools and Tivoli management tools to Solaris for x86. IBM already supports Solaris on computers with Sun's Sparc processors, but decided to create the x86 version based on customer demand, Steve Mills, a senior vice president in IBM's software group, said in a statement. IBM will support Sun's latest version 10 of Solaris for x86 and Sparc."

btw: similar agreement was annoucement last week with EMC, which is great too.

New SX is out

New build of Solaris Express is out based on Nevada b15. Thank's to Dan Prince for nice What's New. Official What's New is here.

btw: if you really want to be on the edge then you can download Solaris Express - Community Release which is actually based on b16. However Community Releases are generally less tested.

btw: one of many new features (in both builds) is New Boot Architecture on x86 based on GRUB - I know a lot of folks were waiting for this! :)

btw2: "EMC Clariion Storage is now supported by MPxIO multipathing" - this is really good news (actually I saw this comming thanks to Open Solaris source). While EMC's PowerPath is better and it costs money - MPxIO on the other hand is free and is good enough in most cases. It's really nice to see MPxIO supporting more and more 3rd party storage (like IBM's FastT arrays). What we need now is a list of all supported hardware by MPxIO.

iSCSI documentation

Here you can find iSCSI documentation for SX.

update: nice post about iSCSI by Ben Rockwood. I wonder is Solaris iSCSI implementation allows not only to be a client but to actually be a server so other iSCSI clients can connect. I have to find some time to play with this technology.

Open Solaris based distribution

Open Solaris is out only for a few days and yet there's already first distribution (beta) based on it - SchilliX. It's a live-CD distribution and can be installed on hard disk too. The author is well know in a community and was the Pilot member so he's been working on it for some time - Jörg Schilling.

UIIIi notebook

Here you can find UIIIi based notebook :)
Some specs:

1.2 GHz UltraSPARC® IIIi processor
Up to 8GB DRAM
Large 17.1" SXGA TFT LCD Display
Full Length, 66 MHz, 64 -bit PCI Expansion Slot
Dual 2.5" High Performance Disk Drives
Integrated DVD/CD-RW Drive

Solaris 10 gets SUSv3

Solaris 10 gets SUSv3:


We are delighted to announce that Sun Microsystems has registered
Solaris 10 on their SPARC and X86 platforms as conforming to the
UNIX 03 Product Standard.

-- Solaris 10 Operating System - on 32-bit & 64-bit SPARC based systems
-- Solaris 10 Operating System - on 32-bit X86 based system
-- Solaris 10 Operating System - on 64-bit X86 based system

Open Solaris - interesting links

If you want to know what's going on with Open Solaris below are some useful links to start-up with. As a lot of features currently in development will be backported to Solaris 10 it's really informative to sys admins to look around so you can know what's coming and what to expect in Solaris (and all the rest features will go to Solaris 11).

If you want to know something more about Fire Engine, Nemo, and other networking staff visit OpenSolaris Community: Networking.

For developers and others interested in how ON (and what is ON) is being developed OpenSolaris Community: Nevada is a place to go.

And you can get list of all the other Open Solaris Communities here.

You can't miss Bug Database - I found many bugs I issued :)

Source Browser - this one is really great! It's really helpful not only for developers but for sys admins too. Now if you get some "strange" log or command output you can just try to search for in sources - it can help you to get answers quick & easy. It's a good fun too :)

If you want to subscribe to mailing lists (I strongly encourage you - there're many talented people from Sun and from community already) go here. Most general mailing list is Open Solaris Discuss. It's a good start.

Now, if you want to get Open Solaris sources and compile them you should go here. It's really simple to compile your own kernel - just follow instructions. Even if you are not a developer it's a lot of fun to do so. And if you got in trouble - just post your questions to Open Solaris Discuss list mentioned earlier - I'm sure someone will help you.

Some people asked me how easy it's actually to compile your own kernel which is bootable. Well, it's really easy! Once you get sources & tools minimum is to setup a few enviromental variables then type 'nightly ./opensolaris.sh' - and you should get kernel (full ON actually) compiled! Yes, that's it! Then you can BFU your system (just one command), resolve conflicts (manually or using again just one command) and reboot your server - now it'll boot your own compiled kernel! So again - just in a three commands you can compile and boot your own kernel! (actually four commands if you count 'reboot'). For detailed documentation look at Release Notes (should be enough for just a try) or if you really want to know what you are doing read even more detailed guide here.

Solaris Engineering - huge amount of technical stuff

As promised - Solaris engineers just have overhemled us with technical postings on their blogs! There's really huge amount of technical data posted just after the launch. Below are some links I collected (it will take a lot of time to read thru all of this) - I haven't catched all of them - you have to find them yourself.

update: Thanks to Liane Praza and Bryan Cantrill you can find more ordered list of some of the links below - here and here.

Solaris Devfs
Solaris x86, device DMA and DDI
NFS4 client's recovery messages
Privelege enabling set-id programs
Making getenv() scale
Bootin Solaris x86 at Fry's
SNMP in Solaris
Hardware interrupts for Solaris x86
Solaris ACLs
Solaris IPoIB
Library bindings
How an IP Tunnel Interface Dynamically Adjusts its Link MTU
Trussing Java
SVM: sms_oban_and_mt_ioctls
NIS to LDAP
NFS clients problem - fix
New Boot Architecture
User Credentials
Raid 10 vs Raid 01 in SVM
dsvclockd(1M): Using Doors to Implement Inter-Process Readers/Writer
Problem with aduit daemon - fix
Increasing UNIX group membership - fix
Link editors - a source tour
GCC support in Open Solaris
Adding command-line editing/history to an application
Adding your own performance statistics to Solaris
Init daemon problem - fix
Inside the Zones Console: a Tour of Comments, and Bugs
SVM and the B_FAILFAST flag
How to add a system call to OpenSolaris
Debugging Solaris Scheduling Problems, and Other Fun Party Tricks
Locale in Open Solaris
Bryan Cantrill's Open Solaris Tour
4314534: NFS cannot be controlled by SRM - fix
4278156: sendmail cores - fix
DTrace to identify memory leaks
cfgadm(1M) overview
FireWire scsa1394(7D) bug - fix
How do Solaris Filesystems Update Statistics Without Intimate Knowledge of the cpu Structure?
ATA on Solaris x86
Socket optins processing
Solaris Standards Conformance
Using libdtrace
Jim Mauro: New Solaris Internals
Kernel Address Space Layout on x86/x64
Solaris AppCrash - update
4028137: close hangs on serial ports - fix
Building Open Solaris as non-root
DTrace as a Stream debugger
Open Solaris: a tester's perspective
Predictive Self-Healing/EFT Overview
Magic ndd(1M) tunables
CMT and Solaris Performance
Dynamic segkp for 32bit x86 systems
x86 32 bit virtual address space - the "small" frontier...
Open Solaris: header files
Dave Miner - DHCP server tour
How to use crypto API in Solaris kernel code
Understanding Memory Allocation and File System Caching in OpenSolaris
SPARC system calls
6266961: long time mallocs on Opteron - fix
Solaris TCP Window Update
Solaris UFS lockfs protocol
Simplified Psuedo-Filesystem Implementation
Using MDB macros
David Comay - Booting Zones Tour
Configuring Solaris ACPI at boot-time
Alexander Kolbasov - Putnext and stack overflows Tour
Privilege Enabling Set-ID Programs: Part 2
Devfs and the Devid Cache
x86 syscall primer
4699850: Compiler reordering problem - fix
5017148: Dispatcher locks and Bug - fix
PCI device identification and driver binding in Solaris
4830628: mpstat sys time incorrect - fix
thread_nomigrate(): Environmentally friendly prevention of kernel thread migration
Paul Lovvik - Solaris goodies
libavl
Open Solaris - finding source for a binary
SCF: Meta Slot
Kerberos' Incremental Propagation and System Credentials
SVM: Diskset Import - An Introduction to the source
MDB: the implementation of ::findleaks
SVM: default interlace and resync buffer values
OpenSolaris Source Browser
Binding processes to Resource Pools
Using lint to find security vulnerabilities
Using Cfgadm with InfiniBand
a brief introduction to inband interrupts - Message Signaled Interrupts
Diagnose networking problems on Solaris
libuutil and designing for debuggability
Runtime Dynamic Linker Performance
5047967 ufs_itrunc does not account for pagesize < blocksize - fix
4765332: Solaris boot perf can be improved by enhancing kernel's vm data structure init - fix
Debug a Large Scale and Complex Solaris Application with Sun Studio
Small logic error, Big Trouble
Playing with Solaris memory debuggers
Open Solaris: a source code workspace management tool, wx
4530367: After retry timeout - nss_search() no longer retries lookups - fix
Solaris USB Architecture (USBA)
Solaris 10 on x64 Processors: Part 4 - Userland
Debugging cross calls on OpenSolaris
SVM: Disk relocation
Fire Engine - introduction
Open Solaris - IPsec
Page Fault Handling in Solaris
OpenSolaris - The 1394 Software Framework
ACPI user options
SVM: Resync Regions and Optimized Resyncs
the error handling portions of the I/O subsystem
Debugging on Sparc
SVM: Multi-Owner Diskset
A one-liner fix for a bug - and how Solaris's built-in debugging facility helped to track it down
5105724: kernel heap corruption due to cv_signal on freed door cv - fix

Something wonderful has just happened!

Finally Open Solaris is up!

You can download sources and compile them yourself! And it works! Several Pilot members, including me, have been doing that for some time. It's quite simple.

I've been involved with Open Solaris for several months now, as many other folks. It took a lot of time to open Solaris but they (we?) did it!

Solaris engineers prepared a little suprise on their blogs - so go to Sun's blog or better to Planet Sun which is a blog aggregator of Sun's blogs. I belive you would find there a lot of really interesting and technical staff about Solaris in a moment.

ps. I really love Source Browser - just try it!

Something's going to happen... Something wonderful...

I understand how you feel.

You see, it's all very clear to me now.

The whole thing.

It's wonderful.

-- Dave Bowman

Adding new disks to Solaris

How to configure just newly added disks in Solaris 10? It's really simple.

// first show all attached targets

bash-3.00# cfgadm -al
Ap_Id                          Type         Receptacle   Occupant     Condition
c0                             scsi-bus     connected    configured   unknown
c0::dsk/c0t0d0                 disk         connected    configured   unknown
c0::dsk/c0t1d0                 disk         connected    configured   unknown
c0::dsk/c0t6d0                 CD-ROM       connected    configured   unknown
c1                             fc-fabric    connected    configured   unknown
c1::200500a0b8169d18           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c1::5006016008065109           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c2                             fc-fabric    connected    configured   unknown
c2::200400a0b8169d18           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c2::5006016108065109           disk         connected    unconfigured unknown
c2::5006016908065109           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c2::500604843d489c84           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3                             scsi-bus     connected    unconfigured unknown
bash-3.00#

// now I attached SCSI JBOD to c3 - let's configure them

bash-3.00# cfgadm -c configure c3
bash-3.00# cfgadm -al
Ap_Id                          Type         Receptacle   Occupant     Condition
c0                             scsi-bus     connected    configured   unknown
c0::dsk/c0t0d0                 disk         connected    configured   unknown
c0::dsk/c0t1d0                 disk         connected    configured   unknown
c0::dsk/c0t6d0                 CD-ROM       connected    configured   unknown
c1                             fc-fabric    connected    configured   unknown
c1::200500a0b8169d18           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c1::5006016008065109           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c2                             fc-fabric    connected    configured   unknown
c2::200400a0b8169d18           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c2::5006016108065109           disk         connected    unconfigured unknown
c2::5006016908065109           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c2::500604843d489c84           disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3                             scsi-bus     connected    configured   unknown
c3::dsk/c3t8d0                 disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3::dsk/c3t9d0                 disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3::dsk/c3t10d0                disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3::dsk/c3t11d0                disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3::dsk/c3t12d0                disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3::dsk/c3t13d0                disk         connected    configured   unknown
c3::dsk/c3t14d0                disk         connected    configured   unknown
bash-3.00#

// that's it
// simple and easy!

Solaris SX build 16

I installed last night o my laptop latest Solaris Express which is based on Nevada build 16, so it includes new booting architecture on x86/x64 platforms. Here are screenshots (sorry for bad quality of these pictures).

Something's going to happen... Something wonderful...

I understand how you feel. You see, it's all very clear to me now. The whole thing. It's wonderful.
-- Dave Bowman

Own Cluster Agents

Some overview on developing own cluster agents.

Voices of Open Solaris

"Most operating system reviews and developer interviews rely on technical points to explain what a project is about and what benefits users might derive from it. We rarely hear from the people responsible for the lion's share of the work in the open source software world. So here's a less technical interview with some members of the OpenSolaris development team."

Full interview here.

B52 drink

Some humor :)

New build of Open Solaris

I've just BFU'ed my system to Nevada build 16 of Open Solaris!

Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.11      milek-b16       October 2007
bfu'ed from /tmp/nightly-nd/ on 2005-06-10
#

btw: Open Solaris is coming really soon now!

Solaris Security Toolkit 4.1

Formerly known as JASS. From System News:

"Designed to simplify and automate the process of securing Solaris Operating Systems, this toolkit is based on proven security best practices and practical customer site experience. It can be used to secure SPARCR-based and x86-based systems."

It's available for free here and documentation is here.

Monitor!

This is cool!

Messaging Server with SpamAssassin and ClamAV

I've just added support for ClamAV to spam_master.

What is spam_master? It's a small C program which allows Messaging Server to use SpamAssassin and ClamAV. It's not a clean code - but it works. You can download it here.

NVIDIA drivers for Solaris x86/x64

NVIDIA just released drivers for its video cards for Solaris X86. You have to modify /etc/driver_aliases to get it working with vide adapters which are not officially supported by Sun. And yes, it supports OpenGL!

Compare by hash

Really interesting paper comparing hash functions efficiency with compression and diffs. Definitely worth reading even for sys admins (you can find there some interesting remarks abour RSYNC).

btw: I have a little bit different version of the document with some minor differences when Val Henson was working for Sun.
And it looks like you can find more interestig papers on her page.