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Is Solarid Dead? Part 2 The Community on Attack.

Wow, I'm amazed at the out cry of both Linux and Solaris users responding to Zemlin's remarks. Waking a sleeping giant comes to mind.

Check out the comments in these links:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/24/39NF-linux-killing-solaris_1.html#commentForm
http://www.osnews.com/comments/20324

My favorite here is:

So, the Linux camp: why attack Solaris all the time? If you are threatened by Solaris (but want it's technology), you really dont have to attack. It is not the right way to get it's hot technology. Why not let Solaris be? Why are you being such a great pr*cks all the time? Why is it ok to bully others? Can someone explain the Linux culture of attacking people and companies and OS? Is it because of Linus Torvalds?

Stating that Linux scales badly above 4-8 cpu was not really correct maybe. It is better to state that Linux doesnt scale well above 16 cores:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8769
Unless you do scientic number crunching, then there is a special Linux kernel tailored to that, allowing massively many CPUs, but it can do nothing else than that.


I dont know if you have seen what Andrew Morton says about Linux kernel? It is really buggy (beyond repair?)
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/


Of course, there are links that showing to migrate from Solaris to Linux is better. But for instance this link, I think doesnt tell the whole picture:
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s...
If you migrated old Solaris 8 Sparc machines to new Solaris 10 machines then you would also see a big performance boost. Possibly even more a boost than going to RHEL as this link shows (Solaris on T1 Niagara CPU being 50 times faster than Linux on AMD opteron):

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s...

I wish that the NY Times allowed comments. So the Community to get there voice heard

Is Solaris Dead? Let's ask Paul Krill

Recently, there seems to have been an attack on Solaris being dead. Two articles here and here make such a claim.

While everyone is entitled to there own opinion, I have a hard time with these articles. Why? because the Authors ask a single person, Who works for the Linux foundation, and takes his word as the truth. There are no facts presented in the articles. Jim Zemlin spends his career talking up Linux. That's his job.

The first big issue I have with the articale, is that he distances Linux from Unix. Last time I checked, when working in Linux, you use ls, chmod, chown, ps, just like every other unix does. So why the distancing? What's wrong with Unix?

Issue two.

Sun officials believe the 16-year-old Solaris platform remains a pivotal, innovative platform. But at the Linux Foundation, there is a no-conciliatory stance; the attitude there is to tell Solaris and Sun to move out of the way. "The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "It is not Unix or Solaris."

In the above paragraph, Mr. Krill, states that Sun officials beleive the Solaris is Pivotal and innovative, but the LF sais it's not. No facts, No number, no studies, he takes the words of Jim Zemlin, over the words of Sun's executives. WHY?

Issue Three.

Linux also is less costly to run, Zemlin claims. Sun, he declared, should just move over to Linux. Zemlin also held out little hope for other IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix platforms. "It's certainly true that Unix is on the decline," he says.

Less Costly to Run Linux...HMMMM. Let's take a look at that. From here we see a 3+ socket box costs $3,600 dollars list to support for 3 years for solaris x86. I searched for support from the Linux Foundation's website, but couldn't find any. HMMM...Ok so let's use Red Hat's support. From here for 3+ sockets would be $4,047 dollars for 3 years. So, where is the Cheaper part? I'm confused.

Issue three:

Thanks to its strong support of the x86 hardware architecture, "in terms of overall volume, Linux is just a much higher volume product than Solaris ever was," says Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. IDC data show that worldwide Linux shipments in 2006 were about 2.4 million in 2006 and nearly 2.7 million in 2007. By contrast, Solaris shipments totaled 376,000 in 2006 and 371,000 last year.

Where do these people come up with this information? Why did this go down, because we give it away for free so people don't order it anymore. They just download it from the site.

I could go on, but why? Three strikes and your out in my view. Does this make you mad? Do you want your voice heard?

Discredit Paul Krill here and here. Don't let these onesided stories live on...Comment on them!

Corrupt Boot Archive on X86 Solaris

I had a customer upgrade the LSI firmware, and for some reason the boot archive became corrupt. So I went to work. Found the below instructions and went to work.

x86: How to Boot the Failsafe Archive to Forcibly Update a Corrupt Boot Archive

This procedure shows how to rebuild an inconsistent or corrupt boot archive in the event you are not prompted by the system to update the boot archive the system, or in the event of a system hang or looping sequence occurs.

1. Stop the system by using one of the methods that are described in the procedure, x86: How to Stop a System for Recovery Purposes.
2. If the system displays the Press any key to reboot prompt, press any key to reboot the system.

   You can also use the Reset button at this prompt.

   When the boot sequence begins, the GRUB menu is displayed.

   +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
   | Solaris 10.1... X86                                                     |
   | Solaris failsafe                                                        |
   |                                                                         |
   |                                                                         |
   +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
     Use the  and  keys to select which entry is highlighted.
     Press enter to boot the selected OS, 'e' to edit the
     commands before booting, or 'c' for a command-line.

   ---

   Note - The contents of the GRUB menus vary, depending on the Solaris release you are running.

   ---

3. Use the arrow keys to navigate the GRUB menu, then select the Solaris failsafe entry. Type b or press Enter to boot the failsafe archive.

   If any boot archives are out of date, a message that is similar to the following is displayed:

   Searching for installed OS instances...
   
   An out of sync boot archive was detected on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0.
   The boot archive is a cache of files used during boot and
   should be kept in sync to ensure proper system operation.
   
   Do you wish to automatically update this boot archive? [y,n,?]
       

4. Type y, then press Enter to update the inconsistent boot archive.

   The system displays the following message:

   Updating boot archive on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0.
   The boot archive on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 was updated successfully.

   If no inconsistent boot archives are found, a message that is similar to the following is displayed:

   Searching for installed OS instances...
   
   Solaris 10.1... X86 was found on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0.
   Do you wish to have it mounted read-write on /a? [y,n,?]

   This message is also displayed after any inconsistent boot archives are updated successfully.

5. Mount the device that contains the corrupt boot archive on /a by typing the corresponding number of the device, then press Enter.

   ---

   Note - If any inconsistent boot archives were updated in the previous step, the device is already mounted on /a. Proceed to Step 6.

   ---

6. To forcibly update the corrupt boot archive, type:

   # bootadm update-archive -f -R /a

7. Unmount the device.

   # umount /a

8. Reboot the system.

   # init 6

This didn't fix my problem, so I booted into safe mode again and when it tried to mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 it did an automatic fsck, and we fixed some bad blocks and links and such.
I then went into /a/etc/vfstab, and noticed that the disks were pointing to c2 instead of c0 so I changed those as well, init 6 and still not booting. Did a format to see if it could even see the disks.

Ok, so then I booted in failsafe mode and the did the following:

1. mount disk on /a
2. rm /a/dev/dsk/*
3. rm /a/dev/rdsk/*
4. mv /a/etc/path_to_inst /a/etc/path_to_inst.bk
   
5. devfsadm -r /a -p /a/etc/path_to_inst

Then init 6 and everything is working.

T

Just for you DJ:

DJ requested that I put a blurb on how I was able to get redirection working in my vmware+vdi+xpVM solution.

After someone told me how to do it, it was actually quite simple.

1. First, without using vdi, use uttsc and redirect the serial port that you want to windows. For example:

/opt/SUNWuttsc/bin/uttsc -r comport:COM2=$DTDEVROOT/unit/dev/term/a -m -b -t 1800 [ipaddress]

The above command redirects {-r} to COM2 what ever device is on serial {$DTDEVROOT/unit/dev/term/a}. Couple of caveats. The serial port on all sun ray 2's is 9600 baud 8,n,1,off. So if your device attached to the sun ray is say and 19200 baud, it won't work. Test this via command line first and get it working. Once that is done, move on to step 2.

2. So all of the Sun Ray compents are great, because they are shell scripts, so they are easily modified. If we were just using uttsc to a windows term server, we would just put it into the web gui of the Sun Ray interface. No such luck with VDI.

So we have to actually modify the VDI shell script that does all of the "Magic".

1. stop VDA: /opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda-service stop
2. Backup the VDA script. cp /etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/vda/vda /etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/vda/vda.bk
3. On line 97 and 99, of the /etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/vda/vda script, you will see the lines that start with $theUTTSCScript. Add the "-r comport:COM2=$DTDEVROOT/unit/dev/term/a" to both of the lines, either before or just after the current {-r disk:u=...}
4. Kill all of the VDA/Kiosk Sessions {utrestart -c}, as one's that already exist won't issue this script. Restart the VDA {vda-service stop}
   
5. Insert your card, and botta Bing. Should be good to go.
   

I hope this help DJ.

iPhone 2.1: I Love you

Wow, what a difference a Firmware Upgrade makes!!! For the first time I can Use 3G all day long...I went from noon to aprox 10pm using my iPhone. I'll post more battery times this week when I'm working.

For all of those people who I told I hated my iPhone I love it now. I feel like I literally have a new iPhone.

What was fixed for me:

• Echo: I was getting a really nasty echo when using my iPhone. It seems to have gone away. When jumping between towers, 1 or 2 sentences might be echoed, but I use to have it where it echoed all of the time. YEA
• Battery Life: As I said above, 3g Battery life seems to have increased significantly
• Push: I will try to turn my push technology back on, as I can handle the battery life.
• Apps: With being able to turn 3g back on, the apps are know much more viable.
• Backup Time: Significantly reduced
• Contacts: They don't stick any more...Before, I'd have to wait 1 or 2 seconds before I could scroll through my contacts.
• Downloads: at 1.2mbps as apposed to 755 kbps (YEA)

All in all, Great work Apple, know if you could have done this for the 2.0 version, you would not have had all the bad press.

iPhone Firmware 2.1: What now?

Well, here we go again, on the Apple Roller coaster ride, will 2.1 do what it's supposed to?

We will find out, back to battery testing with 3G and edge, and see if they are closer now...I won't hold my breath.

Mac and Speech

This week I tried to see if I could get my MAC to do voice recognition. Being a former windows user, I'm used to how my Tablet PC worked. Basically, I could speak e-mails instead of typing them.

Why you ask? So I can work out, and still do work. How sad is that! So I like to speak e-mails while running on the elliptical. Since I was diagnosed with Arthritis in my knee, at 32, I've decided I need to run a lot more, but finding the time is always tough.

I was surprised the Apple didn't include software to take speech and turn it into text. That's the first problem. Ok, so I'm also cheap, so I really don't want to drop 150 bucks to try a dictation tool. Being the savvy internet user that I am, I started searching the internet, nothing in sourceforge. :(

So I'll keep looking, but I see nothing promising, which is very disappointing. Oh Well...Back to the drawing board

Sun Ray default ports

Ok, this is really a post for myself on webadmin default ports for a Sun Ray Environment:

1. SRSS - 1660/1661 (Username default is admin)
   
2. VDC - 1800/1801 (Username default is root)
   
3. SGD - 80/443 (Username default is root)

Also, if VDC is tied into SGD, if the SGD demo licenses expires, VDC and SGD will stop working.

Daughter already into networking

Well, we already know who Jenna takes after. We have ton's of play toys for her, but all she ever wants to do is play with cables and computers. She's so cute. Don't you think?

Great Article on Zombies

Check it out: Here

Missing the Ultra-Thin point

I just read this article on ZDnet: I don't think Mr. Murphy is really hitting the point.

1) Sun Ray's aren't good at everything
2) Sun Ray's are Great at somethings (This beg's the question of #1, but I thought I would say it for completeness)
3) Most corporations have at least 50% of there people using desktop's
4) Desktop's are expensive to manage. (Regardless of OS)
5) Managing desktops is easier to do centrally. (Regardless of the OS)

Hence, an Ultra-Thin type of client is easier and cheaper to manage if it's centralized.

Is Sun Ray's the only answer? NO. Is it AN answer? YES.

Want to run Citrix on a Sun Ray, No Problem, Want to RDP to a Windows Term Server, No Problem. In my humble opinion, this is what makes Sun Rays such a great solution, flexibility.

Red Hat Sun Ray's?

This week I spent most of my time working on Red Hat Sun Ray's. Red Hat? I though Sun made Sun Ray's why would they support Red Hat?

Actually Sun support's Red Hat and Solaris Native, meaning the Sun Ray Server Software is compiled for Red Hat and Solaris. Using Sun's Desktop Connector, or UTTSC, you can connect to any RDP enabled device. (Windows Terminal Server, Windows servers and using the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), you can connect to VM Ware Images that are part of a Pool and automaitically clone, start and shutdown.

The question isn't, can Sun Ray's work for you, it's which way to best impliment Sun Ray's for you.

All of this information can be found at: http://www.sun.com/desktop/