Entries by Joerg Moellenkamp

Once in a while Kris ask his reader who they are. This remembers me each time, to ask the same question in my blog. Kris asked this question yesterday. And of course this remembered me about asking my readers, so i want to ask the same questions: Who are you? Why are you reading c0t0d0s0.org? What do you like about this blog? What do you want to see improved? Which topics would you like to see in the next 12 months?

PS: Answers in english or german are welcome. Other languages would go through Google Translate, so don't be so astonished when i'm insulted by the stuff pouring out of the translator

Peter Judge of eweek visited one of the events taking place to welcome customers and partners of Sun and it looks like that he was a little bit astonished:

The most surprising thing about the event was the complacency. Many of the delegates suggested that this merger, billed as one of the most cataclysmic ever (in a good way or a bad way), might simply lead to business as usual, with the products and support coming from the usual partners and executives, and the roadmap continuing.

In my personal opinion, most customers in IT have a very laid-back view in perspective to our industry and especially in regard to the cat fights between the competitors in our industry. Neither they don't buy in to every nice image a market player tries to paint nor they believe in the images of doom the competitors try to paint about technologies, other companies or just ideas. And most of them take every media coverage with a really large grain of salt. Most customer have a simple approach: "Prove it". Thus i'm not really astonished about the comments in the coffee breaks. It's just the way the business goes in reality.

I've reported about the PSARC case a while ago, but now it's in the code: This putback introduced the fast reboot feature to SPARC. It's implemented a little bit differently at the moment, as it doesn't totally circumvents POST, but it shorten POST substantially by skipping parts of it.

Nur um sich schon mal den Tag im Kalender zu reservieren: Am 8.4.2009 findet von 19:00 bis 22:00 (man lernt ja ) das 11. HHOSUG-Meeting statt. Ich bin noch bei der Themenfindung, werde also noch nachreichen, welche Vorträge auf der Agenda stehen. Trotzdem könnt ihr euch via hhosug11@joerg.moellenkamp.org oder via XING für die Pizza anmelden.

Das Wort, das FDP-Generalsekretär Lindner wahrscheinlich verwenden wollte, war machtgefährdend, das er eigentlich meinte, als er anmerkte, das Kritik an Westerwelle demokratiegefährdend ist. Kritik an Herrschenden ist gerade das, was Demokratie ausmacht. Alles andere nennt sich Diktatur. Wenn man einen Politiker nicht mehr uneingeschraenkt kritisieren und jede seiner Aktionen hinterfragen darf, sind wir einen Schritt zu weit in eine Richtung gegangen, in der wir schon mal waren.

More interesting articles were published in the wake of the 2010.Q1 release of the S7000 software.
Roch Bourbonnais published an interesting article about the performance aspects of deduplication. In passing he explains many details of deduplication. A must read.

Another blog entry written by David Lutz highlights changes to the 2010.Q1 to improve OLTP performance:

As mentioned already, the end result of these changes and other enhancements in the new software update were a 50% improvement in average OLTP throughput for this workload, and a 70% reduction in variability from run to run. Roch also reports a 200% improvement on MS Exchange performance, and others have reported substantial improvements in performance consistency on iSCSI luns.

The new firmware for the Sun Storage 7000 is available for download. The Fishworks team announced this last night in a blog entry. You can download the new software at the download denter. Release notes are available in the FishWorks wiki.

Bryan Cantrill wrote an interesting article regarding the history of this release. Paul Monday wrote in his blog about the new Microsoft VSS provider, Eric Schrock about the multiple pools feature. Dave Pacheco gives some insight into the new replication framework.

When you like to work with bleeding edge technologies or alpha or beta versions, you have often the problem, that problems haunt you nobody had before. You get the hits first. No problems with that.

Perhaps i'm getting old, but sometimes i would like to see a really smooth ride through an installation, especially when it's otherwise a trivial stunt and you just need one additional feature.

I'm sure i will stay awake all night until i have an idea or until my alarm clock thinks it's time to get up. Especially as i consider such situations always as a personal defeat.

The COMSTAR target is in OpenSolaris for several versions. So a PSARC case was introduced to remove the userland implementation of iSCSI in Opensolaris. Today the change found it's way into the codebase. There is just one thing that i don't like about it: There is no shareiscsi=on anymore, as the new administrative model doesn't really fit into such an option. But otherwise the new implementation is much better and versatile.

Jonathan Schwartz opened the curtain to high-level management for all armchair-CEOs (like me) and gave a good example why software patents work pretty much like the nuclear doctrine of the mutually assured destruction. He writes in "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal":

I understand the value of patents – offensively and, more importantly, for defensive purposes. Sun had a treasure trove of some of the internet’s most valuable patents – ranging from search to microelectronics – so no one in the technology industry could come after us without fearing an expensive counter assault. And there’s no defense like an obvious offense.

Really an interesting read.

A reader with much better eyes than mine (think i should really visit my ophthalmologist) found an interesting reference to Solaris/SunOS in the new Tron Legacy Trailer:

It's at 1:12 in the trailer. SolarisOS 4.0.1 Generic_50203-0<somedirt>un4m i386 Unknown.Unknown The architecture is interesting: sun4m. That's something in the range of a SPARCstation 4 to SPARCstation 20, several Lunchbox systems had the same architecture and finally SPARCserver 630MP, 670MP and 690MP were sun4m, too. The production of those systems started in 1989.

Watching this movie:

(click here to view)

Okay, just got an even higer uptime result. A reader sent me a screenshot of one of his older systems: 3720 days, i assume this system was rebooted because of a Y2K procedure because 3720 days ago we had the 1.1.2000.

The October 2001 is a little bit strange from that perspective. So i'm not sure about the real uptime, perhaps the system booted with the wrong clock.

Build 134 of OpenSolaris was made available in the repository yesterday evening for an update via the Update Manager. The ISOs for this release are available at the usual location.