Wed 28th Jul 2010 @ 00:59 2010: Love / Hate

http://www.dump.com/2010/07/20/i-hate-when-websites-do-this-pic/ has this image, complaining that "I hat when websites do this":



It isn't a website problem, it is a software distribution problem. GNU/Linux distributions have no such problems, because everything is an apt-get away, or if you prefer a GUI, then Synaptic:



In 2010, it is no longer possible to argue that it is easier to maintain a Microsoft Windows desktop PC than it is to maintain a GNU/Linux desktop PC.

Wed 21st Jul 2010 @ 23:42 2010: The future of Unix

Tonight I went to the London Open Solaris User Group, or as it will apparently be known, the Special Interest Group for Solaris and OpenSolaris. or something like that.

This is in no way a formal set of notes from the evening, rather the impressions that I, as a now-independent IT Consultant, having spent most of the past decade working indirectly for Sun Professional Services through one Sun Partner or another, took away from it.

Not inspiring stuff. As recently reported, Oracle do not appear to have any interest whatsoever in OpenSolaris. We were told tonight that updates have been pushed to the OpenSolaris tree which actually remove functionality (support for Adaptec RAID controllers was specifically mentioned, something that is not part of the Sun/Oracle Hardware stack, but which is used by many white-box Solaris users, as well as Dell and HP). Dell and HP were also mentioned as having lost their OEM status for supporting Solaris on their hardware. I must admit that I have no first-hand experience of Dell or HP support for Solaris, so I don't know exactly what that will mean for Dell/HP customers running Solaris, though the impression that I got, was that those OEMs will not be able to offer support to their customers who choose to run Solaris on their servers.

If OpenSolaris, which got features such as ZFS root filesystems before it was backported to the now-current Solaris 10, much as Solaris 9 got IPMP before it was backported to the then-current Solaris 8, is now being subjected to a loss of features, that suggests that Solaris 11 may be less of a general-purpose OS than Solaris 10 was. If the goal is to provide only support for the exact hardware that Oracle provide, and to cut out any third-party OEMs, then Solaris/x86 is no longer a general-purpose OS, it would be a black-box OS for specific hardware, just as the firmware in your dishwasher is useless without that exact piece of hardware, and just as unconfigurable.

That is the impression that I got, tonight, in London. It would be very interesting to find out what people in California think about the future of Solaris and of OpenSolaris.

There was a presentation about FreeBSD tonight; there was also talk afterwards about Linux, OpenBSD, and other OSes. The future of Solaris, and those of us who have spent most of our career to date around it, does not look particularly bright.

AIX and HP-UX have not seen anything like the active development that Solaris has continued to enjoy over the past decade. The BSDs are great, in their field. ISPs will always find uses for *BSD, as will others who find networking and security more important than vendor support. GNU/Linux continues to grow, but again, most of the distros have a smaller focus, history, and big-customer buy-in than Unix. Yes, Wall Street and lots of the finance industry run on Linux, but (and this is a Good Thing), Linux is not Unix (come to that, GNU's Not Unix). That is a Good Thing, it is a "GNU Generation" and so on. But the future of the Unix heritage is weaker without a firm hand on the rudder of Solaris.

The Oracle employees at tonight's meeting suggested that there may be some kind of announcement at some conference in September ("Open World", or something? I'm not sure that I caught the name), but there was no real suggestion that it would be a dramatic change from what the OpenSolaris community has already seen.

It will be interesting to re-visit the memories of tonight's meeting in six and twelve months time.

Fri 16th Jul 2010 @ 15:09 2010: Solaris 10 SMF Manifests

Solaris 10 introduced an alternative to /etc/rc.d init scripts in the form of the SMF facility. This is a more modern, powerful and flexible solution, but it involves creating (or, more likely, copying and editing existing) XML files, which is something that many systems administrators are quite happy with, but others are less comfortable with. As SMF's XML format requires very strict XML compliance, and even for all the items to be in the correct order to validate them, it would be much easier if there was a way to automatically generate valid SMF manifests.

So now there is: I have written an online SMF Script Generator, which gives you a custom-made ZIP archive containing the XML manifest, the service method start/stop script, a README file explaining how to use it, and a shell script which will install and register your service.

I do suggest that you read and edit at least the service method script, providing the start and stop functionality for your application, before installing and registering the service.

Fri 2nd Jul 2010 @ 00:34 2010: Microsoft .NET vs Java - The Trailer [Video]

Amusing video about Java vs .NET, and Closed/Open-Source programming