Blogosphere news from you friendly OSS dude.

EVE Online addict

A colleague at work introduced me to the massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) 'EVE Online'.
EVE is a sci-fi based game in which the player takes the role of a spaceship pilot, seeking fame, fortune and adventure.
the game itself won't cost you anything (a 500meg M$ windows download executable) and you can apply for a 14 day trial account to see if the game is for you.
if it is, you can even apply for a 20 day extension of your trial account, but AFAIK after that period, it's game over.
i haven't looked at the pricing of registering an account, but hopefully that's not too steep.

my experiences so far

the game contains over 5000 different solar systems so the galaxy you can explore is utterly massive.

you start by creating a character (choosing from 4 races) after which you'll start inside a space station of some kind.
you're wise to take part of the tutorial (even though that will take you a couple of hours) because lots of helpful tips will be revealed.

the game world speaks of "persistent worlds" meaning the world will keep evolving even when you have gone offline (just like the real world when you take a nap).
to become better at certain skills, you need to first train these skills.
the training occurs in real time, so you choose a skill you want to bring to the next level simply by clicking a mouse button.
after the training process has initiated, you can simply log off and the training process will continue in real time until the required time has elapsed and the chosen skill has reached the next level.
this training of skill is prolly the most important feature of the game: you need to keep evolving all the time to be able to pilot certain space ships for example.

this MMOG is one truly brilliant thing, and the sci-fi bit makes it even a better experience for me.

check EVE out at EVE Online
the site contains a huge fan submitted screenshots section.

speaking of screenshots: here are a couple of mine (taken during the tutorial):





w00t :)

posted by Marco @ 12:18 0 comments

Identifying you memory shortages with Solaris

Pretty much all Unix sysadmins have been there: how do you identify whether your system is suffering from memory shortages?
multiple scenarios exist: systems with little filesystem I/O or systems with lots of filesystem I/O.
1st we need to understand how the Solaris memory system works.

The Solaris memory system counts paging activity generated by both file I/O and application paging with the same counters.
Thus it becomes more difficult to observe the paging activity via the vmstat tool as a method of identifying those memory shortages.
but we can still use vmstat to take away the question of a memory shortage in some situations though.

- use vmstat to see if your system is showing paging activity. if it's not, there is no chance of a memory shortage.
- always look at your swap device for activity. if applications are paging then there must be significant I/O queuing going on for the swap device, hinting you of memory shortage.

the Solaris paging counters show us insight how busy the VM system is.
check the scan rate (the number of pages per second the pageout scanner is scanning).
a zero scan rate means no memory shortage.


Systems with lots of filesystem I/O


i'd like to concentrate on these types of systems since lots of file I/O is pretty common behavior on most servers.
due to the high levels of filesystem I/O it becomes much more difficult to ascertain if the box suffers from memory shortages thus resulting in excessive paging behavior and high scan rate numbers.
when memory shortage does occur, the majority of the page faults will incur I/O to the swap device.
using vmstat, check the swap device, pageout(po) and scan rate(sr) columns.

this little explanation merely touches the very surface of the Solaris memory system.
please, do read the excellent pdf 'The Solaris Memory System' available at Sun.com

posted by Marco @ 21:00 0 comments

Solaris author passed away at 84

Just found a link on Reuters that the Polish author of the sci-fi book Solaris, Stanislaw Lem, has died at the age of 84 after a battle with heart disease.
the Solaris story was originally published in 1961 of which a film was made 10 years later.
in 2002, Hollywood did the remake starring George Clooney.
read up on the full story Here

posted by Marco @ 20:32 0 comments

Scott McNealy is visiting The Netherlands

6 april, Scott McNealy is coming to Holland.
Scott will explain the changes within Sun and he'll talk about what new things can be expected from Sun and what those new things can mean for possible customers.
more info can be found Here

posted by Marco @ 14:54 0 comments

A new look

Today i decided to give my blog another look.
the template i was using before really was a very simple one.
this time i wanted some decent formatting using a style sheet.
so i got around to it and right now i am reasonably happy about the way it's looking.
i also have activated a redirect in my webserver to have all queries to the main site be redirected to my blog section since i haven't updated my main site for quite some time and i am not happy with the way it's looking right now.
once i decide what my main site should look like and have that built, i'll remove the redirect again.

posted by Marco @ 17:29 2 comments

Mighty Mouse koolness

A friend of mine showed me a site where some dude, owning the mighty mouse from Apple, showed a picture what kind of image the optical technology of the mighty mouse leaves behind when you pick it up.
it actually showed something very closely resembling an actual mouse.
after coming home from work today, i decided to give it a go myself to proof whether the picture of the site was fake or not.

Here's what i found out.



i'll leave the imagination up to the viewers :P

posted by Marco @ 21:34 0 comments

Solaris 10 hardening

For all the people who have always found that their Solaris boxes were running too many services after a default install, Solaris 10 ships with so called "profiles".
these profiles are found under /var/svc/profile.
if you take a look there, you'll find a symlink named 'generic.xml' pointing to a file named 'generic_open.xml'.
however, there's also a file named 'generic_limited_net.xml'.
if you make the 'generic.xml' symlink point to the 'generic_limited_net.xml' file, much fewer smf(5) services and instances of services are started upon reboot.
of course, you don't actually have to reboot to make these changes.
smf(5) provides you the svccfg(1M) command.
simply invoke svccfg(1M) as such:
# svccfg apply filename
in this case, we would apply the 'generic_limited_net.xml' filename.
do make sure though to symlink the generic.xml file to the generic_limited_net.xml so the new profile will become persistent accross reboots.

posted by Marco @ 09:46 0 comments

Sun's DTrace vs red hat systemtap part 2

geez, some guys just think the entire universe resolves around linux.
i was reading an article on OSNews.com about linux being a better linux than Sun's Solaris 10.
man, just read that title again; it's already sounding pretty lame.
anywayz, i decided to read the comments posted on this article and came across a post from some ignorant dude stating that Sun is just copying the RH linux model.
how lame is that statement, geez.
so of course i posted a reply to that statement which can be read HERE
in my reply i refer to a link to an article comparing Sun's DTrace to RH's systemtap which i already posted in my blog entry titled Sun's DTrace vs red hat systemtap
this just gives me more reasons to believe that RH linux, and linux in general, is feeling the pressure of the power of Solaris 10.

posted by Marco @ 20:28 0 comments