English

There is a paragraph in Infoweeks recent "Global CIO: Why Oracle's Earnings Will Improve With Sun" article i can comply with wholeheartedly:

Few acquisitions sparked more ill-informed speculation than Oracle's takeover of Sun: from the angst of the EU's anticapitalists, to SAP's and Microsoft's delusional attacks on Larry Ellison's hardware strategy, to the UBS analyst who said Oracle will fire 14,000 Sun employees, to the Motley Fool blogger who said it's a bad deal because Oracle doesn't understand hardware (yes, he really said that).

Amen!

I get more more and more news about hard disks that yield checksum errors with ZFS. However even my RAID set of cheap hard disks didn't yielded any error so far, despite being significantly loaded by the Family Member Wide Area Network. I found this a little bit strange and asked a few people for location and cooling situation. One common denominator of other systems was that they used internal bays, but without any fans for the hard disk. My home server has an independent set of two 12cm fans for the harddisks. At the moment i just a assumption, but i think, that those low-end el-cheapo disks need significant cooling to work longer than just a while without errors, at least significantly more cooling than most people allow them to get. Perhaps you should consider this point for your home servers.

To get some additional data i want you to ask some question. In the case you use ZFS, did you experience any checksum errors while scrubbing? Do you have independent cooling for your hard disks?

Storing a marriage in a database can be really mind-bogling when you want to store every possible way to marry a significant other in a database: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective. Excellent read.

It's just a single track i want to recommend today: It's Animal Collective's "My Girls" from their album "Merriweather Post Pavillion". I heard this track yesterday while watching a documentary about the free solo base jumper (climbing hills without ropes and doing a base jump instead of falling to death) Dean Potter. Somewhat strange music, but i like it ... especially the second half.

There is a neat trick in the case you have an serial adapter, but no terminal programm at your disposal, your mobile data plan don't allow a larger download. Well, just open a shell:

screen /dev/tty.<whatever>

At least for a Sun ILOM serial mgnt port it works right out of the box.

PS: Don't use the original MacOS X driver for Prolific based USB/Serial converters, the open-source variant is a much better alternative (implements BREAK, installer doesn't freeze) . You can download it from the sourceforge project page.

Once in a while Kris ask his reader who they are. This remembers me each time, to ask the same question in my blog. Kris asked this question yesterday. And of course this remembered me about asking my readers, so i want to ask the same questions: Who are you? Why are you reading c0t0d0s0.org? What do you like about this blog? What do you want to see improved? Which topics would you like to see in the next 12 months?

PS: Answers in english or german are welcome. Other languages would go through Google Translate, so don't be so astonished when i'm insulted by the stuff pouring out of the translator

I've reported about the PSARC case a while ago, but now it's in the code: This putback introduced the fast reboot feature to SPARC. It's implemented a little bit differently at the moment, as it doesn't totally circumvents POST, but it shorten POST substantially by skipping parts of it.

More interesting articles were published in the wake of the 2010.Q1 release of the S7000 software.
Roch Bourbonnais published an interesting article about the performance aspects of deduplication. In passing he explains many details of deduplication. A must read.

Another blog entry written by David Lutz highlights changes to the 2010.Q1 to improve OLTP performance:

As mentioned already, the end result of these changes and other enhancements in the new software update were a 50% improvement in average OLTP throughput for this workload, and a 70% reduction in variability from run to run. Roch also reports a 200% improvement on MS Exchange performance, and others have reported substantial improvements in performance consistency on iSCSI luns.

The new firmware for the Sun Storage 7000 is available for download. The Fishworks team announced this last night in a blog entry. You can download the new software at the download denter. Release notes are available in the FishWorks wiki.

Bryan Cantrill wrote an interesting article regarding the history of this release. Paul Monday wrote in his blog about the new Microsoft VSS provider, Eric Schrock about the multiple pools feature. Dave Pacheco gives some insight into the new replication framework.

When you like to work with bleeding edge technologies or alpha or beta versions, you have often the problem, that problems haunt you nobody had before. You get the hits first. No problems with that.

Perhaps i'm getting old, but sometimes i would like to see a really smooth ride through an installation, especially when it's otherwise a trivial stunt and you just need one additional feature.

I'm sure i will stay awake all night until i have an idea or until my alarm clock thinks it's time to get up. Especially as i consider such situations always as a personal defeat.

The COMSTAR target is in OpenSolaris for several versions. So a PSARC case was introduced to remove the userland implementation of iSCSI in Opensolaris. Today the change found it's way into the codebase. There is just one thing that i don't like about it: There is no shareiscsi=on anymore, as the new administrative model doesn't really fit into such an option. But otherwise the new implementation is much better and versatile.

Jonathan Schwartz opened the curtain to high-level management for all armchair-CEOs (like me) and gave a good example why software patents work pretty much like the nuclear doctrine of the mutually assured destruction. He writes in "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal":

I understand the value of patents – offensively and, more importantly, for defensive purposes. Sun had a treasure trove of some of the internet’s most valuable patents – ranging from search to microelectronics – so no one in the technology industry could come after us without fearing an expensive counter assault. And there’s no defense like an obvious offense.

Really an interesting read.

A reader with much better eyes than mine (think i should really visit my ophthalmologist) found an interesting reference to Solaris/SunOS in the new Tron Legacy Trailer:

It's at 1:12 in the trailer. SolarisOS 4.0.1 Generic_50203-0<somedirt>un4m i386 Unknown.Unknown The architecture is interesting: sun4m. That's something in the range of a SPARCstation 4 to SPARCstation 20, several Lunchbox systems had the same architecture and finally SPARCserver 630MP, 670MP and 690MP were sun4m, too. The production of those systems started in 1989.

Watching this movie:

(click here to view)