Sun Trunking for free

Thanks to SunHelp for pointing out that SunTrunking is free now. I guess this probably due to fact that link trunking and aggregation is already part of Solaris Express and is going to be integrated into Solaris 10.

Key features

• Full IEEE 802.3ad compliance with support for the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP).
• Dynamically add and remove trunk members for on-demand bandwidth.
• Bundled Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet links.
• Load Balancing.
• Automatic link level failover.

SunTrunking download page.
SunTrunking page.
SunTrunking documentation.

DTrace origins

How it all started. Really interesting reading.

3GB free email account

We've just updated our email system at http://poczta.wp.pl. We provide 3GB free email account and 6GB for paid customers. I believe this is largest(1) free email account you can get worldwide so far. We are also #1 in Poland with over 3mln active email accounts!

Additionally we've launched thumbnail pictures - so if you got an email with graphics attachments you can see small versions of these pictures under your mail. You can also switch given folder from normal view with list of emails to view with thumbnail pictures from all emails inside that folder.

There are also many smaller enhancements like saving selected attachments in one zip archive, showing all selected pictures on one page, etc.

More new features are coming! :))

Unfortunately we do not offer English interface (yet).

Below some screnshots.







(1) at least when you consider big email providers like Yahoo, GMAIL and other

We're going to terminate you

SX b23 is out

Solaris Express - Community Edition build 23 is ready to download.

update: changelog

Opteron vs. Xeon

We did some tests benchmarking Opteron box and Xeon box on our MTA system.
Servers: Sun v20z with 2x 270 (dual-core 2.0GHz), IBM x345 with 2x Xeon 2.8GHz with HT.

We switched off second cores in v20z, so we were benchmarking 2x 2GHZ Opteron vs. 2x 2.8GHz Xeon. Both systems were equipped with 2GB RAM. Opteron box had 2x300GB 10K internal disks in mirror, Xeon box had 6x33GB 15K internal disk in raid 10.

System: on both servers Solaris 10 was used. Applications were compiled on Xeon and the same binaries were used on Opteron so no special Opteron optimizations were used. Application is an MTA system with antivirus software, spam filters, and many more modules. As Opteron box has slower disks we anticipated it could be slower, but on the other hand all these applications really need lot of CPU power. We used slamd for benchmarking from several clients.

Result: Opteron server is 1.6x faster then Xeon server. Turning additional cores on and Opteron server is 2.62x faster then Xeon server.

Well, we're going to test our web servers next - I wonder about results.

btw: with all cores turned on we couldn't saturate all CPUs on Opteron server - more client servers were needed and at that time I couldn't spent more (10 client servers were used). Xeon server CPU was saturated all the time. Additionally Opteron had much slower disks, so probably we could get even better results with Opteron.

Using NAT with Zones

Sometimes it would be useful to make NAT for local zones. Here is a description on hot to do it using Solaris 10 Zones and IPFilter (which is part of Solaris 10).

DTrace on FreeBSD

Looks like DTrace port to FreeBSD is progressing well.

SX 9/05

Solaris Express 9/05 is available. As usual thanks to Dan for his What's New. This release is base on build 21. If you want to stay on the edge of the edge then go and download Solaris Express - Coummunity Edition based on build 22.

UltraSparc IV+

Finally, new SPARCs are available. Looks like you get can get the same server with new CPUs for the same price.

And official announcement.

X4100 & x4200 architecture

If you want to find out more about x4100 & x4200 server architectures - here is right document.

LSI MegaRAID

Here you can download "Driver ITU floppy image for Solaris 10GA. It contains lsimega driver which will support LSI MegaRAID 320-2x, LSI MegaRAID 320-2e, Dell PERC 4e/si(ROMB controller in Dell PE1850) and Dell PERC 4e/di(ROMB controller in Dell PE2850) RAID controllers".

Censored Sun Ads

Top business publications refused to run our bold ad concepts because the headlines were thought too controversial. At Sun, we're the radical engineers that build "ass-whoopin" technology - we're not Miss Manners and we never want to be.

Censored Ads

Flying Ads

ZFS is coming

Eric Schrock has posted:

We're currently in the "end game" for ZFS development - pushing full
speed towards integration (I won't make claims about an exact time
frame). We considered a more accessible beta program (as well as
opensolaris.org hosting), but it was not an efficient use of team
resources at this point in time, and would likely delay the eventual
integration into Nevada. We promise we're doing everything possible to
get ZFS putback ASAP.

So it looks like it's not that far in a future when ZFS will be publicly available. I can only add that you will really love its simplicity and features.

New x64 servers from Sun

Three new x64 servers from Sun: x2100 x4100 x4200.


There's already review about x2100 server.