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IRIX or Vista? IRIX of course...
2008-05-10 04:39:00 I have a pretty ancient (on the scale of computing industry) piece of equipment occupying a portion of my desk - a 12 year old SGI O2 workstation. And you know what, so far I have no plans to get rid of it. I still think that it is probably one of the best (if not the best) workstation ever made - it is beautiful to look and the technology inside is still pretty impressive even by today's More About: Vista
Nice AIX 6.1 LivePartition Mobility Demo
2008-04-26 14:44:00 Here is a nice little demo of PowerVM and LivePartition mobility on AIX 6.1 I came across of on YouTube. It is very impressive to a see an application being migrated from physical machine to another without skipping a bit. Very impressive and hats off to IBM for advancing AIX on Power this far. Have a look for yourself. More About: Demo , Nice , Mobility
HP Disappoints with Yet Another HP-UX Announcement
2008-04-17 11:48:00 HP hasn't failed to disappoint me in the last 8 years ever since HP-UX 11i was released. Not so much that HP delivers something bad for HP-UX, but rather it seems like nothing gets delivered at all. And each and every time you're left with a sinking feeling that this product is plain stagnating and rotting in the stable. With the last announcement of HP-UX 11i v3 update 2 when you would think it More About: Announcement
It's Official - Linux is better than Windows
2008-02-17 13:45:00 Yep, you read this right. I'm officially declaring Linux to be more usable than Windows (provided of course that there is parity in available application software). The reason I'm saying this is Linux and Ubuntu in particular has passed the litmus test of usability in my book - my wife has declared Ubuntu Linux to be more pleasurable for use than Windows XP. I can't say that my wife is passionate More About: Official
Dvorak vs. MySQL
2008-01-19 12:49:00 I'm pretty sure you've heard the news about Sun buying MySQL and by and large the response from the community has been quite positive, both of the companies have a lot to gain from this and MySQL can make some serious inroads against Oracle-like bloatware littering the RDBMS market. Of course as with any piece of news there is always someone who will always beg to differ and will try to put a " More About: Mysql
NYSE is moving to Linux... Hmm...
2007-12-22 14:39:00 An interesting piece of news hit the press about two weeks ago regarding the NYSE's announcement to to move to Linux with what HP owning the deal. Even though there isn't a whole lot of details publicized about this move it appears that the move is taking place within the HP account (not a win from a competing vendor) - the platform is being transitioned from what appears to be a mix of HP-UX and More About: Moving
SunMC 4 is Out!
2007-11-08 00:59:00 I just noticed that Sun release a fresh new release of SunMC, which stands for Sun Management Center. SunMC is a very solid monitoring framework targeted primarily at monitoring Sun-based infrastructure, so it is not quite as wide in coverage as Tivoli or OpenView, but certainly does a much better job at monitoring Sun hardware that either former or the letter. Although make no mistake SunMC can
Is Niagra-2 Workstation Coming Soon? I hope so.
2007-11-03 12:19:00 Don't you miss the days when Unix workstations were ruling the desktops of the engineering elite? When almost every serious engineer's desktop was adorned with either Sun SparcStation or Silicon Graphics funky colored Indy, Indigo or O2? Well, it looks like Silicon Graphics has been completely erased by its own shortsightedness and the market forces and Sun has been relegated to the highest end More About: Hope , Workstation
How to get environment variables for a process
2007-10-14 11:56:00 Ever wondered how to find out what environment variables the process is running with? Well, it is remarkably easy with pargs utility on Solaris, just give it a "-e" argument to force it to produce environment variables: pargs -e Comes handy when troubleshooting processes that rely on environment variables for various functions. More About: Environment , Variables , Process , Envi
Finding Files with Spaces in Filenames
2007-09-29 03:47:00 I guess I'm too old school, I still don't like using a blank space as a separator between words in a file name -- with every opportunity I replace the blank spaces with underscores because white spaces always trigger bugs in many file handling scripts. Unless every command in the script that works with file name can account properly for blank spaces in the file name, you're risking some funny More About: Files , Spaces
Obtaining network interface information with dladm
2007-09-24 15:07:00 Remember the good old days when you had to use ndd to know whether network interfaces on your machine negotiated the bandwidth and duplex settings correctly? And to make matters worse some interfaces would have slightly different ndd getters to obtain that information, which was fairly frustrating sometimes. Well, it's been a long time coming, but with Solaris 10 you don't have to that any more. More About: Information , Network , Interface
Made for each other: Solaris and PostgreSQL
2007-08-07 04:16:00 PostgreSQL is a great database especially if you run it on Solaris . And Sun is trying to position Solaris as *the* platform for PostgreSQL. The fact that PostgreSQL is now bundled and supported with Solaris 10 should tell you something. And recent benchmarks that Sun posted with PostgreSQL featured as the backend should tell you that Sun is becoming more aggressive with this gem of an open source More About: Made
HOWTO Disable XDMCP on Solaris and HP-UX
2007-08-06 07:52:00 The open door policies of the good old past are long gone and nowadays it is a a duty of pretty much every sysadmin to batten down the hatches on all systems as much as possible. Some subsystems make it a bit harder than the others for simple reason of not being designed very secure from the start. X Window is a good example of that with security mechanism that are not very strong and with too More About: Howto , Solaris
How to Replace Failing Disk Drive in Root Mirror on HP-UX
2007-08-02 09:18:00 HP support web site is a bit like tangled mess to me, it always take a ton of time to find what I'm looking for. There is a dramatic scarcity of really useful how-to type documentation on HP-UX administration. I don't deal with HP-UX very frequently and so I get rusty around certain areas and so need to check the documentation every so often. Replacing failing drives in mirrored volumes is one More About: Drive , Disk , Mirror , Root
Virtualization Makes it Harder to Ignore the OS Costs
2007-08-02 04:50:00 It is easy to dismiss the cost of licensing for an OS as minor when you buy a new piece of hardware to run it. Usually on the grand scale of your hardware purchase the OS cost is just a small percentage of the overall spend and that worked wonders for Microsoft selling Windows, HP selling HP-UX and IBM with AIX - no one cares, but everybody pays. Well, virtualization topping all IT agendas pretty More About: Virtualization , Costs , The O
New Xen Build of Solaris Has Arrived!
2007-08-02 04:40:00 There is so much activity with OpenSolaris project it is now pretty hard to keep track what the next "cool" thing will be coming out of the gates. I just realized that I missed a new Xen build of Nevada -- the Xen enabled Solaris Express build. I have been waiting for this build for almost half a year since the last one was released. This is going to be exciting. Grab your build 66 at the More About: Build
Solaris Cluster Express is Available Now!
2007-07-31 01:50:00 It looks like Sun has made a pretty good addition to the already excellent SXDE/SXCE offering. It appears that now you can compliment your Solaris Express installation with Solaris Cluster Express, which is basically an OpenSolaris-like spin on Sun Cluster product. And the sweet part that you can use this real gem of software for free. I hope I don't have to remind you that Sun Cluster is More About: Available
How to Disable Network Auto-Magic on Solaris
2007-07-30 03:58:00 OpenSolaris has many exciting projects in progress that are making Solaris more and more palatable for use as a desktop OS. One of the projects is Network Auto -Magic , which intention is to deliver a more user-friendly way of configuring network interfaces (a la on Mac or Windows). Network Auto-Magic is already enabled by default in the more recent ships of SXCE/SXDE, which is great especially
PostgreSQL is very close to Oracle on performance benchmark
2007-07-20 02:51:00 It looks like someone finally summoned the courage to do a benchmark on PostgreSQL and pitch it squarely against Oracle -- a feat that is likely to arouse some wrath from the 300 lb. gorilla which is Oracle. Well, seems like Sun had the balls to do it proving in the process that PostgreSQL can indeed be a worthy competitor to Oracle database. It looks like PostgreSQL lagged only 12% behind Oracle More About: Benchmark , Performance , Close , Perform
Power6 Goes Thud
2007-07-19 07:17:00 I visit Sun blogs at blogs.sun.com pretty regularly and here is a little gem I came across with - a blog by Jonh R. Meyer who is a SPARC server technical specialist at Sun. Particularly interesting is a series of posts on IBM Power6 performance or rather lack of thereof. Truly enlightening stuff, much recommended: http://blogs.sun.com/jmeyer/date/200706 More About: Goes
Musings on WPAR Checkpointing and Restart
2007-07-19 05:22:00 It looks like IBM made available the documentation for the upcoming AIX 6.1. Finally it is possible to have a look at the actual meat of the new features promised by IBM. What interests me the most in AIX 6.1 is WPAR or to be more precise not the WPAR feature itself ,which seems to be an imitation of Solaris Zones, but rather the fact that WPAR's are capable of checkpointing and relocation. More About: Musings , Restart , Estar , Checkpoint , Sings
Fixing XDMCP logins on Solaris SXDE/SXCE
2007-07-18 04:43:00 I use XDMCP logins via Xnest quite frequently with X Window to get graphical console on another machine, mostly to do an install that requires a graphical environment (Oracle quickly comes to mind) or launch an application from the point of view of a different machine. With the Solaris Nevada (Solaris Excepress or SXDE/SXCE) builds on x86 I noticed that the XDMCP logins no longer work and when More About: Logi
Howto setup iSCSI target and initiator on Solaris
2007-07-16 12:58:00 I've been itching to see iSCSI target support in Solaris for a long time and it looks like it will be coming in Solaris 10 Update 4, which is approaching pretty fast. If you're one of the less patient people wanting to kick the tires of the iSCSI target on Solaris, you can do it using Nevada builds or Solaris Express as it is otherwise known. To see what you can do with iSCSI target and initiator More About: Setup , Howto , Target
A bit of trivia
2007-07-13 09:00:00 Here is a bit of not Unix, but nonetheless computing trivia. Did you know what 400 means in AS/400? As it comes it out when AS/400 platform was first announced in 1988 the 400 was supposed to be the designator for the maximum number of users the system can support. Apparently that was a pretty high number back in the days and IBM was proud of it. More About: Trivia
Howto do world time converstions from command line
2007-07-12 06:55:00 Assume the following situation - you're trying to find out what time it is in France and being a hard core Unix admin you're got a console of your trusty Solaris box. You could of course start scrambling searching Google for one of those world time sites doing the time conversions, but a much quicker way to find the current time is actually right in front of you -- just use the tzselect and zdump More About: World , Time , Howto , Line , Command
Howto identify a logical device name of a failing disk on Solaris
2007-07-11 04:00:00 Managing a large number of disks in JBOD configurations can be a bit of a pain in the neck, especially when the drives start failing. On Solaris when drive is failing and some SCSI operations fail, the Solaris kernel reports the failing device by its physical device path and by an sd number: Jul 11 11:29:23 v240-xa Error for Command: write(10) Error Level: Retryable Jul 11 11:29:23 More About: Disk , Howto , Device , Logical
Locating Commands in OpenBoot PROM
2007-07-06 10:35:00 I don't know about you, but I'm not really known for having superb memorization abilities, in other words I forget things when I don't use them very often. Digging in OpenBoot PROM on Sun servers is not something I do all the times, since the machines just keep on running and rarely do I drop them to OBP. So when I'm faced with an unusual OBP task, I'm usually stumbling with the correct command More About: Prom , Commands , Loca
Deleting files with weird names
2007-07-06 08:25:00 If you've been using Unix shell for reasonable amount of time, it is pretty much certain that you have come across a situation when there is a file on the filesystem with a wacky name consisting of some special characters. How would you go about removing a file named "'" for instance? These sort of files sometimes appears either because of bugs in the programs or more frequently due to More About: Weird , Files , Names
Sun x4500 - a good place for Solaris to stretch its legs
2007-06-21 02:40:00 InfoWorld just recently posted a review of a Sun x4500 "Thumper" server. What made the review particularly interesting for me is not the fact that this comparatively small server can pack 24TB of storage and can be considered the cheapest storage per gigabyte on the market. What really intrigued me is how other operating systems stack up on this platform -- 48 drives and 24TB storage is a pretty More About: Legs , Place , Solaris , Good , Etch
It looks like Sun Cluster is going to be Open Sourced
More articles from this author:2007-06-21 02:14:00 Judging by this entry on blogs.sun.com the Sun Cluster product will be soon open sourced! Wow, this is great news and will make a super nice addition to Open Solaris. I think Sun Cluster is the best HA clustering product for Unix on the market and seeing it open sourced is just great. Good on you Sun! More About: Going , Goin , Looks 1, 2 |
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