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When you here new music, most music is just substandard ... products of industrialized music production from musicans, that doesn´t deserve this name, as they are just casted into the role of presentators of music, that isn´t art, just the result of market research to provide music you buy, but you don´t know why. Music you hear, but you don´t know why. Music you will forget, and you will never know that you ever knew it. Just to get the money from your purse. And often this works reasonably well to keep the music industry running . But within all this meaningless music you will find some stuff that seems to counter this trend. This recommended listening is such a kind of music.

For people reading my blog for a long time it is nothing new, that i´m a fan of the music of Imogen Heap. Her album Speak for yourself was on heavy-rotation for quite a while in my playlist. Now her new album "Ellipse" is imminent and a first single is available: First Train Home. I like this track ... i´m really looking forward to the album.

This article isn't really about a feature, it's about a directory and its misuse. Furthermore it's an article about different default configurations, that lead to misunderstandings. This is a pretty old hat for experienced Solaris admins (many of them learned it the hard tour), but it seems to be totally unknown to many admins new to the business or for people switching from Linux to Solaris, as many distribution are configured in a different way per default. A reader of my blog just found a 2GB .iso in /tmp on a Solaris system and that's not really a good idea. A few days ago, a user in twitter had vast problems with memory usage on a system which boiled down to a crowed /tmp.

It´s System Administrator Appreciation Day today. When you work at your workstation or when you surfing in the web today, think about all the systems administrators, who make this possible. When you are really honest you just think about them, when there is a problem, but not on all the the days when the system runs smoothly all the day. A mail or a word of appreciation to your admin staff would be a really nice gesture today

SysEleven, ein Hoster in Berlin, schreibt ziemlich begeistert von der Inbetriebnahme einer 7410 in ihrem Rechenzentrum: Die Sonne geht auf

Das zentrale Storage System und damit das Herz unserer Infrastruktur kaufen wir nicht blind. Vor über 8 Monaten haben wir mit der Recherche nach Storage Anbietern begonnen. Wir haben uns NetApp angeschaut und den Vertrieb von Blue Arc fast wahnsinnig gemacht. Unser Herz gewonnen hat letztendlich Sun. Die Mischung aus bewährter Sun-Qualität und modernen Features hat uns überzeugt, die Sun Unified Storage 7410 ist unser neues Speichersystem.

I've lost my fear of flying a while ago, but in the light of the disclosures about the 787 in this article it's a good question, if this fear will haunt me again. At least in a certain type of aircraft. The Seattle Times reported in "Boeing 787 wing flaw extends inside plane", that the 787 hadn't problems with delaminating wings at ultimate load (limit load + 50 % of limit load). No, the problems occurred right above limit load (the maximum load the wing will experience in airline service). Ouch.

At least this gives a good explanation, why Boeing delayed the test flight. The Seattle Times further reports:

Because the wing test fell short of the ultimate load target, the plane could have flown only under restrictions that would have severely limited the usefulness of a test flight.
It also helps explain why Boeing canceled the first flight planned for the end of June.

The new version of the Sun GlassFish Web Stack (the stack formerly known as Sun Web Stack) is available for download as announced by the web tier blog at blogs.sun.com. You will find the following software versions in the version 1.5 of the Glassfish Web Stack:

• Apache HTTP Server 2.2.11
• GlassFish v2.1
• lighttpd 1.4.21
• memcached 1.2.5
• mod_jk 1.2.27
• mod_perl 2.0.2
• MySQL 5.0.67 and 5.1
• PHP 5.2.9
• Python 2.6
• Ruby 1.8.7
• Squid 2.7.STABLE5
• Tomcat 6.0.18

The stack is downloadable at the Sun Website. You find a Getting Started Guide at wikis.sun.com. You can run it on Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86 and RedHat EL 5U2. But the most shocking fact about the new Web stack is the Web Stack Enterprise Manager.A nice looking GUI with some really interesting capabilities to get some insight into your system:

Many news outlets write about the increased adoption of Open Source software in enterprise environments. I'm just curious, but is this the case because of increased adoption of genuine open source software right from start or because of enterprise software going open source. Well, probably both.

While waiting for the first tea of this morning, I had an idea about updating OpenSolaris systems: Preemptive Updates. The idea is simple, but I assume many devils in the details of this idea. Let's assume you installed your system, you are satisfied with the selection of packages and all you do is just updating. Your system is somewhat fixed. You just update it from time to time. So you download fixes, you install them, and you reboot the system. There are many ways to shorten this process. MacOS X loads the updates in advance for example, so you don't have to wait a long time for the download, when the system notifies you of updates. But It should be possible to do more, to install the patches preemptively.

The story about the Triple Parity finally reached the Register today - Sun tripling RAID protection. I won´t comment the articles style ("Hey, that´s old ... and all other will have it anyway soon"). I would be astonished, if they had written "Hey, Sun ... RAID-TP in a Tier-1 product ... well done". But i want to comment this article:

That has to be logically true but, if the use of 3.5-inch disks switches over to 2.5-inch drives then that would reduce failed disk rebuild times. It would also likely increase the number of drives in an array, putting us back, roughly speaking, at square one.

I don´t think that this really true, at least not at this extend. You should consider that the industry reached the 1 TB a few days ago with the Western Digital WD10TEVT. In the 3.5" world the industry is able to put 2 TB in one drive.

Now just a little thought game: The Spinpoint M6 demonstrated, that´s possible to put 3 platters into 9.5mm. Lets assume that 1 milimeter on each side is used for casing and electronics. That´s an per-platter height of 2.5 mm. The maximum height of an 2.5" is specified with 15 mm. Let´s assume 1 mm for casing and electronics again. 13 mm for disks you would be able to put 5 platters into a 15mm height 2.5" casing. Switch back to this new 1 TB 2.5" drive. It provides 333 Gigabyte per platter. Such a fat small disk would provide you with 1660 Gigabyte on 2.5" and that´s not that far away from the 2 TB we have in 3.5". Of course you would not use such a disk in a notebook (to large, to fragile for mobile, too loud), but we talk about disks for usage in the controlled environment of storage chassis.

So, dear Chris Mellor, switching from 3.5" to 2.5" isn´t a jump back to square one. At the maximum it´s a jump one square back ...

There is an interesting article in Businessweek with some insights into the Fishworks project and the development of theSun Storage 7000 series- Innovation Isn't Just for Startups:

With hundreds of customers out of the gate, the Sun Storage 7000 Series has definitely established itself—and Fishworks, which Shapiro continues to run, could well prove one of the hidden gems of the Oracle acquisition. In the meantime, the new product line stands as powerful proof of what Drucker preached: When it comes to innovation, it's smarts, not size, that matter most.

Worth a read.

You know the problem: You are working on your system, edit a long config file and at the end you notice, that you have you didn´t acquired the necessary privileges to save the command. Dammed, saving to a temp file and copying it to a file would be a natural choice. But there is an easier way using pfexec. You find this trick at commandlinefu.com:

:w !pfexec tee %

There is an alternative for friends of sudo on the page.

(via commandlinefu)