Surfing at noon-thirty PST. Oh yeah.

Here's hoping a shark doesn't eat me, lol.

I'll be surfing a few blocks from my new home, in Pacifica CA. The beach is Linda Mar beach, otherwise known as Pacifica State Beach. From my abbreviated research, I've discovered that it's supposed to be one of the better areas to surf, in the region. Multiple breaks that cater to all classes of surfers, a "friendly" surfing beach, etc.

Some nice pics and vids of the area:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=2945361755479732446&q=linda+mar+beach,+pacifica+ca&hl=en&cd=1&cad=src:pplink&ei=pumUTOjvFITmiAPe8unMAQ

Wicked Lasers Customer Support Fail

My typical experience calling Oracle for Unix support

Not safe for work, due to language. Enjoy.

ZFS on Ubuntu 10.04 - Oh Hellz Yeah!!!!

sudo apt-get install fuse-utils
sudo apt-get install libfuse2
sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev

Have fun!

Package: zfs-fuse (0.6.0-1) [universe]


ZFS on FUSE

ZFS is an advanced filesystem from Sun Microsystems, originally developed for solaris. It provides a number of advanced features, such as live integrity checks, atomic updates, atomic snapshots and clones, compression, and much more.

This package provides an implementation of Sun's ZFS filesystem in userspace, using FUSE.

Ubuntu 10.04 on Motion Computing M1400 Tablet PC

So, a friend of mine donated a few M1400 Motion Computing tablets to my collection a few months ago and I've finally got around to playing with them. I think they're more of a boutique item (Pen tablet PCs), rather than "really" something useful, but playing with them may prove interesting.

First off, these things are a bear to boot anything off USB cdrom or USB hard/flash drive. After a minimal search via Google, the consensus looks to be that booting off a firewire drive to be the easiest, so I dug out my old-trusted FW CD drive and plopped an Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD into it.

It booted fine and selected the Try option, rather than install. After a few moments, video blanked out and no more CDROM activity. Lol.

Guessing it's a video driver fubar, I Googled some more and found the following boot option will get you going: i915.modeset=1
by the way, if you are using other video chipsets, here's a brief common list of what you can use:
* Older Intel video card: i915.modeset=1 or i915.modeset=0
* nVidia: nomodeset
* Generic: xforcevesa


Just add this to your list of boot options at the end and you'll get the lovely Gnome Desktop (Or KDE for those running Kubuntu - Which I prefer, myself).

After install, I'll add it to my /etc/default/grub and will run: update-grub

I let you know my mileage on this laptop, after installation is complete and I've played with it, a bit.

By the way: The pen actually worked while booted on the live cd, without any modification or manual loading of Wacom drivers. Sweet.

Dear Jane letter to Sun E6900

Dear Sun Microsystems E6900,

I'm terribly sorry I had to do this through a letter, this didn't need to be done, but I wanted to..

This note will be the last memory you'll ever have of me, I'm done with you because I decided to be with someone new, exciting and 1/4 the weight. Yes, she's a "sexy new-younger model" and is way more interesting.

I should have been honest from the start of this relationship and admitted that you where really too tall for my tastes, anyway. My bad.

Don't let it get you all upset inside, It was completely your fault, no doubt about it. It is because of your history of dragging your ass, taking too much of my personal space and your high maintenance issues, that keep me from being even remotely interested in continuing this relationship with you.

I will be particularly found of the memories of having to hold you late at night, while you wept about not having enough resources, or the numerous times that your thieving nephew, Oracle, would steal your personal space away from you. Why you can't learn from your past mistakes, is beyond me. I'll remember how you would "forget" to do the tasks we agreed upon, and blame it on your failing-aging memory.

You'd be much better off finding someone that can deal with the wonderful way that you make constant promises that you never intended on keeping. I'm not one to "kiss and tell", but I might miss certain things about you, such as your constant nagging for attention. No. It isn't ALL about you, dear. There are others in this family, to consider. What about your poor little sun, V1280? Have you considered his needs? Your brothers and sisters: V490, 280R and let's not forget the black sheep of your family: V120 and his half-inbred daughter V100. They all have needs too and your narcissism is hurting them, so much.

I'm glad this is done and we're going separate directions for good. I think you'll find someone to tend to your constant needs for attention, who doesn't mind carelessly spending their money on your "upkeep" (yes. You ARE one "high Maintenance" lady) and hopefully, we will be incredibly far away.

Forever Truly Yours,
Wrex

Poignant Projects

Poignant Projects

Resistance Is Futile....

So the acquisition of Sun by Oracle is complete and today, they've changed Sun's homepage to re-direct to Oracle's. Good luck finding Sun specific products, rofl.

The customer is always last. They should have at least announced an impending change to the site. It's not like we didn't all expect one.

My Unix beginnings are all due to Sun Microsystems. I am a touch saddened by the buy-out.

The end of an era. Here's hoping for the best.

I'm officially a "twit" now, lol

Yup. On Twitter now. Joy.

You can follow me, here:

https://twitter.com/wrexallen

Some days it's just not worth chewing through my restraints...

That is all.

New project (Hummer HMMWV H1 project)

So I discovered a little company that makes H1 kits called the Urban Gorilla. A kit-car of sorts, for trucks, transforming them into HMMWV (Hummer) look-a-likes. How kewl is that?

Check them out: http://www.4x4bodies.com/

I've just acquired the donor vehicle. A 1986 Chevy Silverado. Good times ahead! It's already lifted a bit and in great condition. See pic.



I am planning on starting this project early spring 2010. Hoping around late March or Early April. My goal is a close-to-military spec in appearance.

I've created a blog, specifically for this project. Check it out.

Some quick Solaris 10 Fault Manager Daemon notes

fmd - fault manager daemon commands:

# Display current faults:
fmdump faulty

# View fault files:
fmdump

# View error log files:
fmdump -e

# View previous log file:
fmdump /var/fmd/fmd/errlog.1

# Rotate log files - you may have to stop and start fmd if the process is
# too busy to rotate the files. This could be a catch 22, the fmd process
# must be running to rotate the files.

# Rotate error log files:
fmadm rotate errlog

# Rotate fault log files:
fmadm rotate fltlog

# Log files:
/var/fm/fmd
root@yourbox# ll
root sys 3 dir rwx------ 512 16:32:06 06/25/2009 ckpt
root root 1 file rw-r--r-- 44,427,432 12:55:28 11/18/2009 errlog
root root 1 file rw-r--r-- 1,774,698 12:05:24 11/18/2009 fltlog
root sys 2 dir rwx------ 512 12:05:24 11/18/2009 rsrc
root sys 2 dir rwx------ 512 09:24:38 06/24/2008 xprt
There are 5 items and 46.20MB (46,203,666 bytes) in /var/fm/fmd

# View fmd processes:
root@yourbox# ps -ef | grep fmd
root 9042 1 0 12:03:30 ? 2:25 /usr/lib/fm/fmd/fmd
root 25435 25261 0 12:54:51 pts/1 0:00 grep fmd

# Stop and start fmd:
svcadm disable svc:/system/fmd:default
svcadm enable svc:/system/fmd:default

Just a quick note about mounting ZFS resource in a non-global zone...

This is in response to a question that was posted in the SUN Solaris Experts group on LinkedIn:

I keep running into people who think that you have to reboot a non-global zone to add a ZFS mountpoint. Not true.

After you add the zfs resource to your zone.xml (use zonecfg, if you follow recomendation, heh) you perform the following on the Global Zone (not within the non-global zone). Be sure to define the type as "legacy":

root@global-zone# mount -F zfs your_zpool/your_filesystem_name /zones/non_global_zonename/root/your_mountpoint

Log into your zone and you should now see the new filesystem (DF or whatever).

Gzip with ZFS pools and Datasets..Mmmm. Tasty!

In case you weren't aware, Gzip compression is now available (has been, for a bit now) with ZFS Datasets in Solaris 10. Yay!

To set:

Identify the existing pool/dataset you want to enable the compression on:
root@Yourbox-> zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
adminpool 980G 81K 980G 0% ONLINE -
rpool 29.8G 20.7G 9.09G 69% ONLINE -

root@Yourbox-> zpool status adminpool
pool: adminpool
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
adminpool ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

root@Yourbox-> zfs get compression adminpool
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
adminpool compression on local

Turn on or change compression algorithm:
root@Yourbox-> zfs set compression=gzip-9 adminpool

Check if set:
root@Yourbox-> zfs get compression adminpool
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
adminpool compression gzip-9 local

You can also set at dataset creation time (See example, further below).

You can also choose the level of Gzip compression (1-9). Default is level 6, basically, where 1 is fastest and 9 is most compressed.

You don't have to set the whole pool and rely on inheritance (datasets under the pool) for subsequent datasets, adn the pool's level can differ from the child dataset: You can specify for each dataset, under the pool, specifically. This is useful where you may have several datasets maintained under the same pool, and one may need more compression, whereas another may need better performance.

root@Yourbox-> zfs create -o compression=gzip adminpool/yourdata

root@Yourbox-> zfs get compression adminpool/yourdata
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
adminpool/yourdata compression gzip local

root@Yourbox-> zfs get compression adminpool
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
adminpool compression gzip-9 local

Compression in ZFS improves I/O.

There are a ton of articles and comparisons out there now, so just google for it.

One thing to note is that the default lzjb may be better suited for run-time apps, whereas Gzip may be better suited for archival. There's some debate on this, out there. Try it out and you can make the determination, for yourself, after some testing.

Have fun!

Puppy dog tales...

So last Friday, the GF brought home a stray she found. She (The dog) was wondering around a busy parking lot, at Hobby Lobby.

I am a HUGE animal lover, especially when it comes to dogs, but we already have a large-breed (Rhodesian Ridgeback) spoiled-rotten-and-much-loved furry son and taking on another dog, another large-breed (she's def has Lab in her), at that, doesn't make for a happy Wrex.

So, I am trying to give her away to a good home. It's hard. I totally understand why she rescued the dog and I am actually happy that the dog is safe. I just don't want to get sucked-in, into wanting to keep her. She's so damn cute and adorable!

I've got to get rid of her soon, else I won't be able to part with her, lol.

Alright, don't take my man-card away. Just look at her and see what I mean.

ZFS Deduplication Is In!

If you've been waiting (as I have) for Dedup capability in ZFS, then the wait is close to over. See Jeff Bonwick's blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup

I can't wait to test it, as soon as I can find out how to get my hands on it, lol. It's not in Sol10 update 8, nor is it in the most recent snapshot of OpenSolaris, but I suspect it will be out soon.

Edit:

Seems my rss feed is slow. It's currently in OpenSolaris, as of last night!
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/onnv-notify/2009-November/010683.html

Cutest Dog Competition

Solaris 10: Enable SMCwebserver For Easy ZFS Management.

You know, sometimes a GUI is nice to have around. I'm not "really" a "GUI Fanboy" when it comes to system management and administration, but there are those times when it's just easier to see things, presented in way that's easy to access and not have to run a handful of commands and scroll through a ton of output, etc.

A lot of you are probably already aware of the SMCwebserver http interface and are still trying to remove the bad taste from your mouths, from the Oct 08 release of Sol 10 that totally fraked the whole thing up. I am happy to report that, thus far, it seems it's working again, in the May 09 release (5/09 s10s_u7wos_08 release). Now lets see if a subsequent cluster patch breaks it again, rofl.

I digress...

So, for those who are un-aware of how to enable the service to accept connections, remotely, here's a quick and dirty:

/usr/sbin/svccfg -s svc:/system/webconsole setprop options/tcp_listen = true

/usr/sbin/svcadm refresh svc:/system/webconsole

/usr/sbin/smcwebserver stop

/usr/sbin/smcwebserver start

/usr/sbin/svcadm enable svc:/system/webconsole

That should do it. Now make sure your port (6789) is listening to "All" (*):
/usr/bin/netstat -an|grep 6789

*.6789 *.* 0 0 49152 0 LISTEN

Now open your web browser on your desktop machine (laptop, whatever) and go to the server:6789

(http://your.server.address:6789)

Go through all of the security exception notifications and log in with the account with proper credentials (like root, for example, though I suggest you set up another account, instead).

Have fun with it and here's the smcwebserver manpage: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-5166/smcwebserver-1m?a=view

-W

Apple's new Remote Wipe feature on MobileMe

Crapped out my 3G iPhone. All I get is an apple logo. Two days with support and no fix. How sad for me.

Solaris ZFS and Containers (Zones)

Been working with ZFS and Solaris Containers a lot, as of late. We're moving our entire environment from Storage Foundation 4.0 to it, as a matter of fact. We never "really" utilized the majority of the clustering capabilities, anyway, as the app admins "have" to manually manage their applications, during a fail-over (bad app design, in my opinion, but whatever).


Keep an eye out on for the next few weeks for notes on ZFS, Zones (Containers) and working with Oracle 10g with ASM and portability across the SAN for zone detaching and zpool exporting. Fun stuff! I'll "brain dump" everything that I've been keeping notes on, here.

-Wrex