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SeekingAlpha points to the upgrade of SUNW by Goldman Sachs:

Laura Conigliaro, hardware analyst at Goldman Sachs, today raised her rating on Sun Microsystems (SUNW) to Buy from Neutral, following a sell-off in the stock and a presentation by the company at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in Las Vegas.

James posted another good example how to orchestrate some of the key Solaris 10 features: Extra layer of security on 15 minutes.

When i think a little bit longer about it, it seems to me as a nice idea to run the services in a zone even when it´s the only zone on the system. You use only the global domain only as a service domain. You would be able to move around your installation within a seconds (when you host your zone filesystem on a network file system). You would be able to observe the zone undetectable from users inside the zone. An attacker would have no way to detect the tripwires running in the global zone for example.

Upgrading your zone would be easier two: Clone the zone, upgrade it, do some configs, rename it, change the ipnumber and when you detect later on, that you´ve done total bullshit you can switch back to your old zone within a few seconds.

I think, i will do some research regarding this concepts when i´m back from the States ...

Interesting article about a different perspective to the Suntel-Deal: The forces that forged the Suntel alliance:

So the SIs – the firms with both specific market knowledge and increasingly trusted brands – are becoming the front line for hardware and software vendors like Intel and Sun, because they are the companies that users turn to first.

In my personal opinion the x86 business has to be an business for system integrators or as an part of a project, because the low margins at 1 or 2 processor systems doesn´t let much room for presales. SI can cover the presales costs in bigger solutions but when you only sell the box, you must keep human work out of the equation as long as possible. As Intel has a huge influence to the SI ecosphere, it has a positive effect for Sun to have Intel in the boat for sure.

Finally! Solaris 10 Update 4 will contain the iSCSI Target according to Scott Tracy´s blog. With the iSCSI Target you can give other operating systems the advantages of ZFS by giving them a volume on a Solaris 10 machine. Think of the Solaris 10 as the firmware of an Storage Device. And well, and other filesystems participate on all the advantages of other features in Solaris, for example Fault Management Architecture for preventive substitution of hard disks.

Es hat verdammt gut getan, mal um zwanzig Uhr ins Bett zu gehen, die Handys auszuschalten und das Notebook im Arbeitszimmer zu lassen. Das ich das wohl noetig hatte zeigte mir: Statt meiner üblichen 4-5 Stunden etwa 10 Stunden tiefen Schlaf.

Many people don´t now that there is a load balancer in Sun Cluster. Or they hear it in their Cluster training and forget it afterwards. Okay, i wouln´t use it for extreme heavy duty tasks on the network side (software loadbalancer have their disadvantages) but for many sites this this a acceptable solution. Prasad Dharmavaram describes in his blog how to use it.

PS: Did i mention, that you can use Sun Cluster for free even in production environments (when you don´t need support)? So essentially, you get a load balancer for free.

The accumulation of data about a person at one place under control of one organisation is the single biggest threat to privacy. Thus in many countries exist a data protection law to inhibit the existence of such large data silos. But many of us give their private data voluntary to one organisation: Google. What´s the plan behind this data collection? What are the implications? The movie of two students at the University of Ulm points to this topic.

When you think about this topic, it looks pretty scary. Is Googles mantra "don´t be evil" sufficient to allow a single organisation to collect such amounts of data?

(found via: juergen-luebeck.de)

ZFS is implemented in a modular manner, so it´s relativly easy to integrate you own functionality into the filesystem: Adam Leventhal integrated the gzip compression algorithm into OpenSolaris. For archival purpose this would be quite good choice to have a slower, but more effective file system compression algorithm in the kernel.

Ben Rockwood of cuddletech writes about the full integration of resource control into the zone configuration. Well, he didn´t really wrote about it, he posted an configuration export, but this speaks for itself.

What a country will the bush administration leave after the regency of Bush, the Second? Starting two wars, ending none of it. Ignores the public opinion to the surge of troops in irak, draggin it´s allies into conflicts started by him and his entourage ("WMD? There have to be somewhere!") and now: Reintroducing the compulsory military service!

Universal National Service Act of 2007 (Introduced in House) - HR 393 IH:

To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to make permanent the favorable treatment afforded combat pay under the earned income tax credit, and for other purposes.

Well, there is one person, who is the authoritative source for information about the Sun/KKR-deal. And you find his comments in his blog: The Quarter, KKR, etc.

Under the headline "Barbarians on a Leash - Sun solicited KKR cash, but curbed further investment." the Red Herring tries to give some explanations about the Sun/KKR-Deal announced last week:

In answer to the most pressing question, Sun officials say this deal will not be the prelude to an exit from the public markets. In fact, the deal’s fine print includes a “standstill agreement” that bars nine-month-old KKR Private Equity Investors, the publicly traded arm of KKR, from acquiring more than 5 percent of Sun shares through the close of the deal in 2014.

An interesting tactic to keep private equity companies at bay: Other companies won´t invest, as KKR is already there with a convertible debt and KKR can´t buy more than 5 percent.

This was not unexpected, but this made my day: Alex Ionescu writes in his blog, that he is able to break the digital rights management of vista. He was able to deactivate driver signing and thus he can inject a driver that circumvents the copyright protection mechanisms. If this is true, this has two interesting implications:

• Strictly interpreted the keys for Vista to play HD content must be revoked and all new HD medias need a new key for windows. This is not exactly the stuff you want to hear promptly to the general availability of Vista
• Driver signing was touted by Microsoft to be an protection against malware. This proctection didn´t even survived the GA day. Can you really trust Microsoft that they are able to build a secure OS?

I hope that his breach will be confirmed soon. They had five years to develop the next version of XP, and weren´t able to make it right. One question: Who were the NSA employees who helped Microsoft? The janitor and the till girl in the cafeteria? Sorry for the spitefulness, but i expected more from the allmighty National Security Agency.

Lesson from a speech at a customer site today: The killer feature of ZFS isn´t a really a cool technical one. Not the checksums. Not the maximum size It´s the ease of use of snapshots. Going into .zfs to reach a snapshot seems to be a real "want it" feature.

Why the heck everybody beliefs, that it´s sufficient to build a descent graphical interface to build a so called "Mac OS X" killer or even an Vista-Killer like Rich ... As long you get told "you have to echo this sequence into that file in the /proc file system for suspend/resume" and you have to twiddle here and to twiddle there even to get the basic stuff running, Linux isn´t anywhere near of being a desktop operating system outside the restricted environment of corporate desktops. At maximum it´s a smaller variant of the favorite operating system of some server jockeys.

Usability is more than a rotating cube with desktops. This is a sugar icing on the cake, but in the case of the desktop usage for Joe Sixpack the there misses something important: a finished cake under the icing. And to be honest, in the past years i didn´t saw Linux catching up. Today it´s perhaps there, where MacOS X was at 10.0, you can use it, but your environment learns a swearword every minute So, as long OS/X will be developed by Apple and Microsoft makes a bad rip off of all the good feature every 5 years or so, i don´t see a Linux distro as an killer for anything for the next time.