Tuesday
27
April
2010

TRON Powered by Solaris?

  • Posted by esproul at 15:08:24  //   // 
  • Solaris

Dennis Clarke noticed something interesting in a trailer for Disney’s upcoming TRON Legacy movie. A glimpse of an “old” computer interface shows what looks like a window running “top” and another window containing a semblance of “uname -a” from a Solaris machine.

Reminds me of spotting nmap in Matrix Reloaded.

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Friday
4
May
2007

Ulcer-free Solaris Upgrades

  • Posted by esproul at 02:19:29  //   // 
  • Solaris

As any admin knows, OS upgrades can be painful. Despite the best intentions and efforts by the vendor, bad things happen. This is especially true with kernel upgrades. It’s one thing to run a blanket “yum update” or “apt-get upgrade” on your average Linux desktop, but even the tamest patch can ascend to truly ulcer-inducing levels when it applies to a critical system that can ill afford any extended downtime.[Read More…]

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Thursday
15
March
2007

OmniTI Labs

  • Posted by esproul at 15:00:53  //   // 
  • Solaris, ZFS

At the $DAYJOB we use a lot of open source code, as do the vast majority of our clients. While not always the best solution, it often permits us to build excellent solutions at a low cost. This week, we launched OmniTI Labs as a place to collect various bits of code developed in the course of our business and share them with the community. We have some phenomenally talented people on staff, so expect good things.

I’m proud to have had a small part to play in one Labs project to this point, Zetaback. Zetaback is a backup utility for ZFS. It’s the brainchild of Theo Schlossnagle. It’s still in alpha, but we’re running it internally with good results.

OmniTI Labs will be a great place to find lots of other useful tools that may be just what you’re looking for to solve your problem.

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Friday
25
August
2006

Economical Shared Home Directories with Solaris and ZFS

  • Posted by esproul at 20:32:12  //   // 
  • Solaris, ZFS

At the $DAYJOB, we have a cluster of build systems that we use to test source trees on various platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris. Some of these machines are fairly old, and have relatively puny hard drives by current standards, yet they continue to do their job just fine. We’ve simply begun to run low on local storage, as the source trees grow and developers need to work with multiple branch and tag checkouts.

Rather than try to boost local storage with extra drives (not a surefire solution everywhere), we focused our attention on a shared storage solution. The idea was to reuse some decommissioned hardware and create enough storage for every build system to be able to mount its home directories and give developers the space they need to do their work.[Read More…]

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