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As the first of my readers enter 2009 in a few minutes (e.g. the readers in New Zealand), i want send some greetings from my side:

I wrote it before in my blog, but once (when i was young and wild) i threw a sales rep out of my office, who tried to get into the account (me) by FUDing their competitor. I was responsible for an project in the range of 10 Million Euro, thus i assume they got to much "Deutsche Mark" signs in their eyes. I had a basic simple rule for conversations with vendors: You have to shine for your self. If you need to point to non-product related weak points, there is a high probability, that the business relation will be an unpleasant ride.

I wouldn´t disect HP or IBM balance sheets at a customer meeting, albeit i would disect peformance claims and hint to quirks.I wont use the unclear future of FuSi directly at a customer. I fight on a technical level ... everything else is for sissys not knowing their shit ...

Using FUD is a good fear detector in my daily business. The amount of spreaded FUD is proportional to the amount of fear. Thus i have to assume that Mr. Zemlin of the Linux Foundation is really afraid of Solaris.

In the article "Linux in 2009: Recession vs. GNU" wants to make a point for Linux again. It´s Zemlin FUD time again. I tend to award him the "Golden FUD catapult 2008" for this stuff and his infamous involvement in this story

At first: When all the commercial products are to expensive for a customer, he could opt in recession times for the free stack at Sun. For example running your systems with Opensolaris, Sun Java Application Server, Mysql or the Sun Web Stack for free without support. And when your company have weathered the recession and your budget isn´t such a sad story, just call the Sales Rep. Or you could use the equivalent to a debian like structure. OpenSolaris 2008.11 with Glassfish V3 with Mysql Community Edition. Recession IT budgets doesn´t equals Linux. But i wrote about that before. I wont write about it again here ...

I was upset by another comment. He states :

Zemlin also sees FOSS as remaining strong on the server, with Linux continuing to be the major player. Most of Linux's growth in 2009, he said, will be "at the expense of Sun Microsystems, which is floundering in its business model right now. People look at Linux, and they say, HP, IBM, Dell, Intel and AMD -- these are collectively not going to go out of business any time soon. Then they look at Sun Microsystems, and they say, 'Whoa! This company has some serious financial difficulties, they have an uncertain future -- that's not a safe bet for me.' Nobody is really growing much, but where there is growth, it's going to in Linux."

I want to dissect this statement.

At first. AMD and Intel are somewhat OS agnostic. They make their money with supporting Windows, not with this niche market called Unix x86 market. Sorry ... the Q1CY2008 x86 server market was 1.9 million systems large. The market for MacOS X based systems was 2.6 systems(perhaps this is the reason, why they got the "65nm chip in a 45nm casing" custom build from Intel for the MacBook Air). Server x86 is a an intersting business for both it it doesn´t pay their bills. Or the other way round: If you don´t like Sun x86, you just can user IBM, HP or Dell as well with Opensolaris x86. And furthermore: IBM, HP or Dell aren´t married to Linux. When the three think that there is money to make with Solaris, they will sell it. And they already sell it. And they will drop Linux faster than you can write "penguin" when they come to the conclusion, that it´s not cost effective to sell and support Linux.

BTW, Mr. Zemlin, Sun has no financial difficulties ... it has a problem with its stock price ... the financial reality and the stock price isn´t really correlated (if it´s correlated at all, i have my doubts about it))

Okay: Opensolaris ... the code is opensourced, the cat is out of the bag. Anybody can build it´s own business on the basics. Just a thought game: Let´s assume Sun would go out of business tomorrow. Without a warning. Jonathan says: "Dear shareholders, here is the money. Let´s call it a day. And thank you for the fish". Now take into consideration, that the installed base of Solaris as large as billions and billions. Business is like political power. It don´t like a vacuum. Allowing everybody to participate in the development is just one side of opening the source. The other side is the fact that you enable everybody to support the code. The whole business model of Red Hat or Suse is largely based on this point. Thus in the theoretical case Sun support for Solaris would disappear, it would take a few days until another company fills this vacuum. There is money to earn. Much money. But this whole discussion is hypothetical: There is no vacuum to fill, as Sun won´t disappear. And Sun wants to earn this money. Anyway: The complete discussion and the idea introduced by Mr. Zemlin is just utter nonsense, classic spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. FUD 101.

I could make a similar prediction about Linux: In the course of the recession more users of will opt for free distributions like Debian, CentOS and OpenSuSE as their budgets don´t allow them to buy support for every system. The sales of subscriptions will decrease. This will lead to financial pressure to the major vendors of Linux distributions. Because of the single-trick ponyness of both vendors (RedHat and Novell) it put both companies on the verge to oblivion. They will cease to exists of purchased by IBM or HP. Futhermore this will bring problems for the core development of Linux (not the drivers, the real core) as the both companies employ many of the core devlopers.

Doesn´t sound reasonable? Well ... then tell why it´s more rational to assume a company with hundreds of billions installed base, billions of revenue a year, positive cash flow, 2 billions at the bank, almost no debts should go out of business or purchased. The last thing is extra ridiclious. It´s credit crunch time at the moment. The hedge fund locusts don´t get money to do they business at all even for smaller deals, everybody keeps it´s money to have liquid money in case of a longer credit crunch phase and we didn´t talked about the anti-trust regulations at all.

At the end Mr. Zemlin just spreads FUD. Large amounts of it. Dear Mr. Zemlin, we can talk about the importance of features like in your last FUD marketing attempt, we could talk about technical advantages of Linux and Solaris. But dear Mr. Zemlin, stop to discredit yourself as a FUD thrower ... otherwise you are burden for the community you represent ... again ...

2008 is over. Almost. I don´t think, that the last few days will change it. At least i hope so. But ... i don´t see any game-changing development for the last few hours of this years.

One of the big headlines of this year was "loss": The biggest loss at first. I´ve lost my grandma at the beginning of this year. My grandma was already in an age of 60 when i was born. That´s an age where the death starts to take away our grand parents. So the additional 34 years were a gift. Each year.

In the middle of the year i´ve lost a friendship ... at least i thought she was a good friend. But errors are human and i´m just a human. I really thought that that this loss would hurt me. I don´t make friendship easily. But at the end the exact circumstances of this situation created opposite feelings. At the end it´s better that way: Friendship is something mutual ... and if one person think of a relation as a friendship and one other as a loose acquaitance it´s better to keep it the second way. I still do not fully understand the dynamics of that situation but i stopped thinking about it a while ago. You can´t look into the brain of other people.

At the end of the year I´ve lost another friendship to a large heap of misunderstandings. But without trust there is no friendship ... and at the end there was no trust. It´s just a very loose acquaintence now from my point of view. It was my fault as well as the the fault of this friend. But well ... this happens. Shit happens.

The other big headline was "win": I´ve won new friends. Albeit i never met Marianne, we have developed a strange kind of friendship in the mean time. I´ve met other great persons this year. I would call them friends right at this moment, but they are already important to me.

Additionally i thought, i´ve lost the very special relation to another person, but the end of this year proved otherwise. There are very rare persons in your life who are so special, that even not seeing them for a while and huge hassles in both lifes doesn´t change a thing.

Personal targets? The last two years weren´t good ones in regard of my weight. Too much work, too much frustrations, less sports. This has to change, but i started to do more sports. So this will be just a matter of months after. Christmas is over, so no further problematic days in sight. Want back to my old weight.

The blog got more and more important to me this year. Personally and professionally. My objectives for this year were 5000 Visits per day , 750 subscribers und 600.000 Pageviews. The results of this year: Up to 10000 visits per day (with large variances the, at the weekend the visit count drops to 1000, monday and friday are the best days), 1175 subscribers (right before cristmas) and 750.000 page views and 15 million served requests by the webserver. Objectives for the next year? Well ... up to 20000 vists, 2000 subscribers and 1.5 million page views. I know ... very high targets but targets have to be hard to be challenging.

The "Less known Solaris features" series was a large success. 15.000 downloads of the pdf versions. The web log versions of the document´s articles were loaded 105.859 times in the last year. My plans for the next year? I´m already working on a german version. I will publish it as a book as planed at first. I will publish it as a free .pdf-book again. In the next few weeks i will publish a revised version (with the help of Ceri Davis, who helped with the english grammar and typo checking) of the english version. I hope i can iron out all the tex warnings in the next few weeks. Such a tedious job...

Professionally i will plan my next steps in the next few weeks: I´m member of the ´09 SEED mentoring programme as mentee and i was one of the first ones matched to a mentor. I think i had luck with my mentor.

I plan to talk more often on public conferences (hope my papers are accepted, one is a live LKSF session, another a talk about my view to virtualisation and some additional smaller sessions) and i´m planing for a new career step (I´m staying at Sun, at least when Sun doesn´t think, i should be part of the 6000 people, so it´s something internal to Sun) but it´s much to early to talk about that.

I wish you all a good start in the next year. May all your hopes for 2009 come true. May all your fears in 2009 turn out as unnescessary over the course of the year.

With gcore you can create core dumps of processes without the need to stop them. You can do the same with the crash dumps as well. You can trigger a crash dump without rebooting the system. The command for this task is the savecore command. The normal task of this program is to take the content of the crash dump device and to create files in the regular filesystem to make them persistent for further studies after the reboot of a system.

Hmm ... long time ago i´ve subscribed a Google news alert about "Sun Microsystems". Sometimes it gathers really excellent articles at locations i wasn´t aware of before. But most of the time it gathers pure bullshit. On of this "pure bullshit" articles is this one: "OpenOffice bound for orphanage?" written by Mr. Barlow.

At first: Openoffice wasn´t developed by volunteers the last 20 years. The earliest versions were written at by Star Division in Hamburg. In 1999 Sun acquired Star Division. We opened up the code in October 2000 and since this time there is OpenOffice and StarOffice (an enriched version of OpenOffice). Many Staroffice developers paid and pay their bills by working for Star Division or Sun.

About the orphanage thing: I have a good insight into that topic ... i´m working in the Sun Office in Hamburg. Staroffice Development and the Sun Office are in the same building. At a part even in the same floor of a multi-floor building. And i don´t see any sign of orphanage ...

I won´t comment on the other bullshit in the text. So, dear Mr. Barlow, please just don´t comment on things without doing any basic research (a short search on wikipedia would be sufficient). But i don´t think that was his intend ... i smell a pro-Microsoft agenda in this text.

BTW: The article "Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org" referenced by Mr. Barlow is written by a Novell guy working on a code-fork of Openoffice and he is promoting it in his text. Hmm ... i´m not that deep into the openoffice development structures, so i will leave it to a fellow blogger from the Staroffice Development to comment that article. But some parts reads as a Novell vs. Sun thing at some parts. Obviously it´s a pain in the a... for Novell that the sole usable Office suite for their flagship product SuSE Linux is a product of a development community lead by Sun. But that is just my impression.

Andy held a presentation at the 9th seminar of the International Comitee of Future Accelerator: The Solid State Storage Revolution. The pages 25 and 26 are especially interesting.

PS: Other topics were Neutrino factory and muon collider R&D or X-band high-gradient and CLIC R&D for future colliders and other strange stuff like that ...

Only 45 flights this year ... thus it was a little bit harder to requalify for FTL. At the end it was the last flight of the year in conjunction with a retroactively submitted boarding pass. Reached it with the margin of a whisker. Now i´m FTL until 2012 ...



But i have no idea how to get 93.261 miles in just two days to reach Star Alliance Gold status .... Well, first class to New York and back should do it ... but that´s a little bit expensive for an airline status with dubious real benefit. But i assume, it´s impolite to write that into the message beneath the actual value.

The developers of LDOMs gave the users of the T1 and T2(+) based system a nice christmas present: The 1.1 version of the LDOMs. This update provides some interesting new features:

• a new XML based interface to manage Logical Domains
• "Guest Domain Migration provides the capability to migrate a guest logical domain from one server to another compatible server. If active, the domain on the source server is suspended, and its configuration and run-time state are transferred to another server, where the domain is recreated and resumed."
• Virtual Input/Output (I/O) Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) provides the ability to add and remove virtual I/O services and devices without rebooting
• Enhanced Networking subsystem
• "Network Interface Unit (NIU) Hybrid I/O provides support for a virtualized I/O path, a hybrid I/O path, and better performance and scalability. "
• "VLAN Support provides the capability to configure and use virtual local area networks (VLANs) in logical domains"
• Enhanced Storage subsystem
• Virtual Disk Failover adds support for disk multipathing
• Single-Slice Disk Enhancement allows installing the Solaris OS on a single-slice disk.
• New and Changed CLI ldm Subcommands

You can download the new version of LDoms at at the Sun website.

Interessanter Kommentar von Norbert Bluem zur aktuellen Wirtschaftskrise im Hamburger Abendblatt:

Die gegenwärtige Wirtschaftskrise bietet manche Erfahrung, aus der man klüger werden kann: Keiner der großen ökonomischen Koryphäen des Neoliberalismus' hat die Krise kommen sehen. Die etablierte Wirtschaftswissenschaft hat sich blamiert bis auf die Knochen. Der "Chefökonom" der "Bild", Professor Sinn, das Beste, was die Zunft offenbar bieten kann, im Nebenberuf Generallobbyist der Privatisierung des Sozialstaates, gab noch Mitte des Jahres Prognosen von sich, die so treffsicher waren wie eine Wettermeldung in New Orleans gewesen wäre, die beim Ansturm von Katrina eine Schönwetterperiode angekündigt hätte.

und

Ökonomische Blasen sind virtuelle Hohlräume, die mit nichts anderem als mit Erwartungen gefüllt sind. Mit den Realitäten von Arbeit und Wertschöpfung haben sie so viel zu tun wie Wetten mit Leistung.

After some comments from readers Marina and I updated the article about pfexec at the Sun Developer Network. We integrated some clarifications and changed the wording in some parts.

It`s difficult to write a text, when the jargon is a little bit ambigous. After a writing "root capabilities" several times, you want to use another word ... as i think of having root rights as a privilege (you are a trusted and knowledgeable user), i like the phrase "root privileges". But as privileges are already a common phrase in Solaris 10, it´s a little bit problematic as the capabilities of root are the result of a set of privileges, not a single privilege. So there is no "root privilege" (set this privilege and you are root) in the sense of the least privileges concept. At the end we opted for leaving the phrase "root privilege" in the text at some parts.

Glenn Brunette and Jeff Victor published an interesting document about Solaris Zones with the Blueprint "Understanding the Security Capabilities of Solaris Zones Software":

So why does the world need yet another article about Solaris Zones? Simple. Most publications and sites focus on the consolidation benefits of Solaris Zones. While server and service consolidation is a key use case for Solaris Zones, there is so much more to the technology. Other materials focus on system administration practices related to configuration, installation, management, and troubleshooting. This is incredibly useful information, but there is still an important gap. Namely, many people do not have a full appreciation of the security benefits enabled by Solaris Zones, and sparse root zone configurations more specifically.

Definitely a must-read document!

This recommendation is from the darker side of my musical taste. It´s Collide ... an electronic band from California. I´ve wrote about this band in this block back in 2005. How can I describe Collide at best. Hmm ... well ... think about the more melodic pieces of Nine Inch Nails (like Ruiner, Heresy and Perfect Drug) with female vocals.

The both musicians of Collide published their new album end of September. I really waited for their new album, as their remix album Vortex was somehow addictive and albeit their spin off project "The Secret Meeting" produced excellent results it made the waiting time for the new Collide album a little bit longer for me, as Collide is still a tiny little bit better. As usual with my taste of music: You like it or you hate it. I recommend Tongue tied & twisted, Spaces in Between and Shifting for a first taste.

I´m driving to my parents in a few hours from now. I´m already packing my bags for a few days at the moment. But i won´t leave Hamburg without sending you my best wishes for Christmas! I hope you will have some quiet and stress-free days with your loved ones!

A really positive article about Opensolaris 2008.11. Steven Lawson writes in OpenSolaris 2008.11: Its Time Is Coming:

I was attracted to OpenSolaris 2008.11 in the first place by a couple of other internet articles, one of which posed a question, the other a bold statement.
The question was: "Will OpenSolaris 2008.11 attract Linux users?"
And the statement was: "OpenSolaris tackles Ubuntu dominance".
Let me deal with the question first by answering simply, 'Yes, if they have any sense'. And as for the statement, my reply is: 'No, it doesn't, not yet - but one day soon it should'.

and

OpenSolaris 2008.11 is well worth investing some time and disk space on. I think we will be hearing a lot more about this operating system in the future.

Of course he sees room for improvement, but at the end the improvments are just "We work on that" issues: More packages (in this article multimedia applications) and more wireless drivers.