c0t0d0s0.org

The year almost over. As usual at this time i'm finalizing my tax declaration at the moment. But nevertheless i wanted to write a short article about the last year.

The year started quite bad. In March i had a really bad argument with a good friend and we didn't talked a word since that. Albeit my communication habits could have been better in that days, i assume the writing were on the wall before that day in march and it was just a matter of when, not if, when the argument broke loose.

But starting in June the world just gone downhill for me. It started with the events that finally led to the state the blog currently is. That is really a large thorn sitting in the flesh hurting me all the time. However the consequences were inevitable.

The job had two really great satisfying moments for me with larger successful projects, and a number of others were i was able to help others to find problems. That was really and deeply satisfying moments.

Other things weren't that well as well: Just two main ones … in my vacation i was ill at the weekend and needed almost the complete vacation to get really rid of that nasty bug, and then just 2 days in the job again i broke my ankle and had a torn ankle ligament. While it was painful at least my body seems still to have its good regeneration capabilties in regard of injuries. I don't need painkillers any longer and i'm just wearing the aircast orthotic device at the moment. 24 days is not that bad.

On the good side: My house is almost completed … perhaps 3 month of work in the evening left. So i will have more time to other things soon: Like really pursuing new opportunities - career as well as personal - , finding a new hobby in the year one after almost two years of construction work that rules out any other free time things. Like reading through the heap of books that piled up this year, to get rid of several kilos. Finding a new car in February. Thinking of a nice S60 at the moment. Trying not to break my bones again. And perhaps a longer vacation abroad this year.

I wish you all a good transition into the next year and successful 2012.

Work in Progress - this entry will change often in the next days and weeks

A few days^H^H^H^Hweeks ago, i wrote about simulating the cloud that is most often tagged with the name "network" or "intranet" and sometimes "internet" . This would not be c0t0d0s0.org without an article to explain how you can configure this. This article will explain how you simulate a complete network on a single host with routers, switches, dynamic routing protocols and so on

Scope

At first i want to set the expectations right. I don't want to simulate a cloud in the sense of cloud computing here. I'm thinking about something more complex:



I'm talking about the simulation of this cloud, that often hides a lot of complexities and traps in architectural diagrams.

I wish you all a few quiet days with your loved ones and may all you wishes come true!

Ankle is really hurting. A big thank you to the pharmaceutical industry for providing pain killers. However i would like to concentrate a little bit better again. However things are getting better day by day ...

Just thought, that our perception of the world is heavily influenced by the representations of it ... like a map. Just to demonstrate, a question: Assume you are a pilot. You are flying from Frankfurt to San Francisco. You are a lazy pilot and you are allowed by air traffic control to set the shortest direct course on the autopilot and don't touch it again. What is the initial heading you are setting? Just answer with the first thought! No degrees needed ... just something like west,east,south our southeast.

Damned, now i have a lot of time ... because of a mismatch between the real number of residual steps and the perceived number of residual steps on a stairway. Now i'm a proud owner of a fractured ankle join (the doc is not totally sure if it's a ankle ligament injury as well, next x-ray middle of next week will show it). Can't need that right now ...

In the past i wrote quite often about a thing that i call systemic features, when features start to fit together seamlessly in order to create possibilities more than the sum of the features. One of the systemic features is the simulation of the cloud. I don't talk about that thing that most people connect in mind with the word cloud (the grid with a credit card checkout ), but the cloud-like icon in many architectural diagrams called "Network" or "Internet" that sits between the client and the application that often resembles the "a wonder happens here" box in many architectures.

It's not new: I talked about this mid November at the DOAG conference in Nuremberg. And i've playing around with this at customers an privately for a while now.

Many customers have networks as large and as complex as the internet part of a smaller country perhaps 15 years ago. The interesting question is: How can you test your application for it's resiliency against failures in this cloud shaped icon. How does your application react, when your network is doing its high availability magic.

And interestingly Solaris 11 can help you here. The thoughts behind this are pretty simple.

• A router is a computer that runs an operating environment that is tailormade to do network stuff, but at the end it's a computer with a OS (yeah, i know, hardware offloading makes this a little bit more complex, but at the end it's that way)
• A zone is a virtual operating environment.
• Each zone can have it's own set of routes.
• Each zone can have it's own set of firewall rules.
• Each zone can have it's own set of processes.
• Routing protocols are not more than processes collecting information from the network and configuring the routing table.
• You can install a vast array of dynamic routing protocols on a zone.
• I can have up to 8192 zones (given enough memory)
• In Solaris 11 i can emulate switches (etherstubs)
• I can limit bandwidths in Solaris 11 out-of-the-box with crossbow

When i'm combining all this features i can set up a vast array of zones doing nothing else taking each incoming packet on a interface, routing it on a multitude of ways between each other, and send it out on a outgoing interface. Even when the system in your environment are placed in many separate networks of your network you can still use a system with many networking cards or something called server-on-a-stick (single high-bandwidth connection to a vlan-trunking capable switch and using the switch ports as a fan-out).

So in order to emulate a complex corporate network, all i have to do is configuring a lot of etherstubs, configuring many vnics, replicate the physical bandwidths with the maxbw setting on the vnics, set up a lot of zones, perhaps translate the ACL of the routers into firewall rules for firewall functionality of Solaris, installting the routing daemons and configure it similar to the configuration of the routers (in regard of timeouts and so on).

Now i can test, how my applications react, when the network starts to converge against a new topology because of the failures of some lines. I can test, to which topology my network will converge after an line outage (which is nothing more than a deny-all firewall rule). I can test the impact, when the network converges that way, that my traffic flows over a 2 MBit/s line instead of a 155 MBit/s line. For even more complex failure modes i can even use the htbx driver to introduce additional latencies, packet drop or packet reorderung as shown in this article. In essence you can emulate your complete internal network in a single box and with Zones and Crossbow in Solaris 11 it's so low overhead (at the end it is still just one kernel) that you can really emulate the reality and not a simplyfied view, as you don't have emulate via separate hardware or many independent operating system instances in virtual machines.

At the end you could simply use a single Solaris system, put it between all your test systems and use this solaris system as a emulation device for your corporate network. It's simulating the cloud-shaped icon in your architectural diagrams.

Vor der Acquisition von Sun durch Oracle gab es ja die Sun SE University. Dieses Format gibt es wieder. Vom 13. bis 14. Dezember 2011 findet die erste Oracle PARTNER SE University in Fulda statt. Diese Veranstaltung ist für Partner System Engineers gedacht, von denen ich weiss, das eine Reihe hier mitlesen. Mehr Informationen findet ihr hier

The newest revision (the rev valid as of December, 2nd) of the document "Partitioning - Topic: Server/Hardware Partitioning" naming the technologies allowing you just to license a subset of the available processors in a system for a Oracle software has been modified: Oracle VM for SPARC is now explicitly named as a hard partitioning technology.