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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

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.

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)

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.

Stefan Hinker presents in his blog the screenshot of a Solaris 8 system up and running for 6 years 5 months 29 days. So this system was booted the last time on Wednesday, September 10, 2003. It's a safe assumption that this system is totally downrev.

One of the annoying (but technically necessary) things with auditing in Solaris was the point that you had to reboot the system to activate it. This isn't needed any longer: It's now always activated, thus you could start to configure and use it without this reboot. The changes resulting out of the PSARC case found their way into the codebase today.

A new interesting PSARC case found it's way into the development process with "PSARC/2010/080: Brussels II addenum". It's the addenum to "PSARC/1009/306: Brussels II - ipadm and libipadm". The outcome of the Brussels II project is really interesting: It completely revises the mechanisms to add, delete an manage IP interfaces in Solaris. At the moment you use ifconfig and /etc/hostname.* files for this task. Such configuration would be done by the =ipadm= in the future. For further information you should look into design document as well in the draft of the man page.

While preparing for doing some work at a customer site next week, i stumbled over an interesting document in the document navigator on the right column in the navigator . It looks like the ak-2010.02.09.0.0 as the release notes found their way to the wikis.sun.com page. There are a lot of interesting features in this release:

• Fibre Channel target
• iSER/SRP target (yeah ... iSCSI/SCSI via Infiniband)
• Kerberized NFS
• Volume Shadow Copy Service block target provider (you need it to remote control snapshots from a Windows application for backup purposes)
• CIFS access-based enumeration (just see the files, you are able to access)
• Multi-interface iSCSI targets
• Deduplication (!!!)
• Multiple pool support
• Improved remote replication
• some Microsoft interoperability enhancements
• AD LDAP signing

However the software itself isn't downloadable at the moment for the public.