Dell PowerEdge Servers now Solaris Certified
I work for an IT company who primarily use Dell servers for their IT infrastructure nowadays.
Before using Dell as our hardware vendor we used (and are still using) Sun hardware to run our enterprise critical Oracle databases on the Solaris OS.
Its been a long long time since we ordered any new Sun hardware and the current Sun boxes are in much need of a replacement (EOL reached some time back).
So when i discovered that Dell is now offering Solaris 10 Certified boxes on their PowerEdge servers it brought a smile on my face.
I already informed our DBA team of this nice fact so they can look into it and hopefully some nice deal can be made with Dell to ship some nice Solaris 10 boxes our way :)
Dell PowerEdge Servers now Solaris CertifiedCan you say w00t ?!?!
MSN app for iPhone
I was browsing thru the App Store to see if any apps would catch my interest and then i noticed a very nice looking instant messenger app called: Palringo Instant Messenger.
To my knowledge this is the 1st instant messenger app for the iPhone available thru the App Store that supports multiple messaging services.
Here's the, almost complete, list:
AOL's AIM
Google Talk
Yahoo! Messenger
ICQ
Jabber
and ... take a deep breath .. Windows Live Messenger!
Okay before you all get excited and start getting this
free app i do wanna let ya know the app has 1 major downside: you can't run it in the background so when yur iPhone auto-locks to go to sleep mode or you press the home button you will get disconnected!
This is not so much the fault of the app itself but more of how Apple designed the iPhone not allowing processes to run in the background.
So to stay connected set iPhone's auto-lock setting to never if you plan on being away from your iPhone longer than 5 minutes (the max setting for auto-lock).
The description of the app mentions that it's actually a "rich messaging service" meaning that it not only supports text messaging but you can also send pictures and vocal instant messages.
You do need to register a free Palringo account but once that is out of your way you are good to go .. just add the services you like and yur contact list will be added automatically.
I've not had the app crash on me yet so it's looking okay-ish so far.
Palringo not only runs on iPhone but also on other mobile phones, Macs and PCs.
The Dark Knight
I just got back from the cinema having watched The Dark Knight. Wow what an awesome movie. I really liked it's predecessor Batman Begins but this one even topped that. I don't agree with the statement some ppl have made saying that Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker was worthy of an Oscar tho. Don't get me wrong, he played the part pretty good but I just don't think it's Oscar material. I do hope another Batman movie is going to be done starring Christian Bale as the caped crusador cuz I think he plays the role of Batman really well.
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America ehrm .. Yesterday
A while ago my gf and I went to Amsterdam and to our surprise we walked straight to a lil shop which sells nothing but imported food n' candy from the states. So we stocked up on pop tarts and some other yummy goodies and last but not least American pancake mix (Mrs. Butter-worth's) :)
So we made pancakes last night and they were frickin' delicious :)
This is 1 store we'll keep going back to from time to time, I'm sure.
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Tickets Are In !!
W00t .. ordered 2 tickets on presale for the october 13th Disturbed venue in the Heineken Music Hall (HMH) in Amsterdam and they arrived in the mail :D
Hehe these babies are secure :)
Tacky But Awesome Loveseat
My gf and I were at the shops and decided to visit the local trendhopper store. That's when we saw this awesome tacky couch .. Tacky in a good way tho :)
See for yourself
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Metal Is Upon Us
Maiden time is not too far away and today I learned Disturbed will be coming to Holland this October with the presale starting tomorrow at 5pm :D
Can you say Woot?
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iPhone Sweetness
I've had my iphone since July 18 and have never enjoyed any cell phone as much as this gorgeous device :D
The keyboard was a lil getting used to but I'm able now to use it using 2 fingers and I just love the auto correction to death.
I've installed several apps from the app store and been having a blast with them. The iPhone is the best thing I've bought in a long long time :) can you say Woot ? :)
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My 1st LifeCast Test
Posting this blog entry using my iPhone 3G :)
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3G iPhone and WWDC08
Only 4 frickin' days to go until
WWDC08 (WorldWide Developers Conference) keynote where hopefully the 2nd gen iPhone will be unveiled!!
this upcoming monday at 19:00 Steve Jobs will kick-off
THE keynote the whole iPhone loving world ( that means me very much included :P ) has been waiting for .. hoping for the introduction of the 2nd gen 3G iPhone :)
for ppl like me not living in the States we hope that several official deals will be available by the time the iPhone is released in Holland
by that i mean a customer can either buy an unlocked iPhone and use his/her current sim with it or can get the iPhone thru pretty much all the mobile operators in Holland who provide (the full 3.6Mbit) 3G/UMTS/HSDPA network capability
the guys over at
iPhoneclub.nl will offer (nearly) realtime coverage of the 2008 keynote on
their site starting at 18:30
w00t .. can't wait for this one boys n' gurls :P
SUNWzsh (4.3.4) without largefile support on sxce 75 !
Im currently running sxce 75 and, as usual, downloaded the latest 3 x86 chunks (build 76) from
the OpenSolaris site.
After unzipping and having verified the chunks' md5 checksums ( digest -va md5 file is yur friend ) it was time to concat the 3 files together to create the iso which is needed for the LiveUpgrade process.
mcp% cat sol-nv-b76-x86-dvd-iso-a sol-nv-b76-x86-dvd-iso-b sol-nv-b76-x86-dvd-iso-c > sol-nv-b76-x86-dvd.iso
after waiting awhile i suddenly got a ' cat: write error: File too large '. (the output file at that point was about 2 gigs in size).
further investigation showed nuffin out of the ordinary at first
plenty of available storage space on my ZFS filesystem ( so i didn't hafta investigate whether that particular filesystem was mounted with 'largefiles' cuz that is the default with ZFS ).
mcp% zfs list -o name,used,available,reservation,quota mypool/home/foo
NAME USED AVAIL RESERV QUOTA
mypool/home/foo 18.2G 22.8G none none
so also
NO reservations set and
NO quota to mess stuff up!
so what the hell was going on here ?!?!
after digging even further i came to the conclusion that the shell meh was using (/bin/zsh from SUNWzsh) had been compiled without largefile support !
i've always used zsh from SUNWzsh on previous sxce builds too and never hit this problem before!
after switching to bash from SUNWbash i was able to successfully create the iso to start the usual LiveUpgrade routine to be able to boot into sxce 76.
i'm curious as to whether i will hit this problem again during creation of the 77 iso using SUNWzsh when i'm actually running 76!
Intel vs PPC differences for Leopard
For those of us lucky enuff to run Leopard, we all know what great new features have been introduced.
However, a difference was spotted by a friend and former colleague of mine in the behavior of the /bin/ps utility.
Read his rants and findings
Here
iPhone a piece of shit ? Part 2
Well, first after being really amused by the initial article in Part 1 i found this little gem of an
Article.
This seems like some serious exploit in the Safari webbrowser code.
Luckily tho Apple has been notified of the exploit and according to the article a proposed fix with full public disclosure is coming at the BlackHat conference on August 2nd.
yours truly is eagerly awaiting the software update for Mac OS X too should the same exploit also affect Safari on OS X ;)
i'll switch to using Firefox for the time being again.
Can you say eek!
iPhone a piece of shit ?
I know, it's been a while since my last post ;)
I just read such a hilarious article via my friends from
Digg i just couldn't withhold to share with you guys.
I really cracked myself up reading this one, i was actually crying from laughter.
You be the judge, hop over to
the article and see for yurself.
Sun LU (LiveUpgrade) koolness
I recently started playing with LiveUpgrade since i wanted at least 2 boot environments residing on a single-disk system which i could easily boot from so it was time for a little HowTo :)
This HowTo describes the process to create a 2nd
BE (Boot Environment) using the
LU (LiveUpgrade) suite of tools on a single-disk system and to use that 2nd BE to upgrade to a later nevada build to boot from.
Note: We initially install snv_52 and create the 2nd BE with the goal to luupgrade
(1M) that 2nd BE to snv_53.
First when creating your system, reserve some diskspace for a slice to actually ho
ld the 2nd BE (this slice needs to be equal or bigger in size than the root slice of the install you're about to commit to).
I tend to create the following disk scheme during the initial install of the 1st BE:
c1d0s0 / 15g
c1d0s1 swap 2g
All the remaining disk space can then be later allocated via format
(1M)So once you're done with the whole installation process and have a running nevada instance it's time to prepare the 2nd BE.
We run format
(1M) and create a 15g slice to house the 2nd BE on slice 7 (c1d0s7) and label the disk.
Now that we've got this slice we can use this as the destination slice for lucreate
(1M) the 2nd BE into.
snv_52 comes with the SUNWlu packages installed (5 in total) but when upgrading to a later nevada build it's always advised to use the SUNWlu packages from the build you're upgrading to since they tend to be a bit more recent!
So first pkgrm
(1M) the following packages:
# pkgrm SUNWlucfg SUNWlur SUNWluu SUNWluxop SUNWluzone
I downloaded the snv_53 x86 ISO and mounted it via lofiadm
(1M) as so:
# lofiadm -a /path/to/sol-nv-b53-x86-dvd.iso /dev/lofi/1
# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
Now that the nevada image is mounted on /mnt it's time to install the newer versions of the SUNWlu packages.
# pkgadd -d /mnt/Solaris_11/Product/ SUNWlur SUNWluu SUNWlucfg SUNWluxop SUNWluzone
Now comes the part where you lucreate
(1M) your current BE to the new BE.
# lucreate -c snv_current -m /:/dev/dsk/c1d0s7:ufs -n snv_53
This populates the c1d0s7 slice by copying the current contents of the active BE onto this new slice.
Once this process has successfully ended, verify thru lustatus
(1M) whether the new BE has been created.
# lustatus
Boot Environment Is Active Active Can Copy
Name Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
-------------------------- -------- ------ --------- ------ ----------
snv_current yes yes yes no -
snv_53 yes no no yes -
Next we upgrade the newly created BE (snv_53 which still holds a snv_52 image) to the snv_53 nevada build:
# luupgrade -u -n snv_53 -s /mnt/
Again we wait for this process to finish so we can luactivate
(1M) this BE.
If everything went smoothly no warnings/errors should've been mentioned.
The kool thing about using the lu tools in this manner is that parts of the initial BE are shared into the new BE so user accounts and their home directories will simply be available when switching to the new BE !
# luactivate snv_53
No tinkering with grub
(5)'s bootfile is required by using bootadm
(1M).
Luactivate
(1M) takes care of populating grub
(5)'s menu with the appropriate entries and making the snv_53 BE the default boot choice.
Now the only thing left to do is to either shutdown
(1M) or init
(1M) to boot into the new BE.
Note:
DO NOT use reboot
(1M) or the new BE will not be booted from !!
That's it, we now have 2 BE's on the same disk which we can boot from.
Reverting back to the snv_52 build is as simple as running luactivate
(M) passing the old BE as its argument and rebooting again via shutdown
(1M) or init
(1M).
# luactivate snv_current
Should the luupgrade
(1M) leave you with an unbootable system the following sequence of events will revert your system back to the initial BE:
- boot from dvd and bring the system to single user
# mount -F ufs /dev/dsk/c1d0s0 /mnt
- luactivate (without args)
- exit single user and reboot (use shutdown
(1M) or init
(1M))
w00t!
