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Solaris 10 Boot Camp
Went to a Solaris 10 boot camp shindig over in Indy on Wednesday.
A decent amount of intro material. I got to scratch the surface of Dtrace, Zones, and ZFS.
Impressions:
- Dtrace: way cool for debugging or performance tuning, but probably not terribly useful in day to day activities. It’s hard to tell with an hour of talk just how useful it could really be. I suspect it’s more useful than I’m quite understanding without having played with it a lot more.
- Zones: a poor excuse for a virtual machine. IBM, VMware, and Xen have it right: virtualize the hardware, not the operating system. Zones seems like the FreeBSD jail mechanism taken to the obvious but the necessarily ridiculous extreme. Instead of trying to manage operating system resources and information at two levels simultaneously, just make a clean break and allow us to run whatever OS on the virtual container. Much cleaner break, and probably much more intelligible from a management perspective.
- ZFS: now this could be exciting. I really hope they add something other than mirrors to the basic volume set (RAID 5 would be nice). The management of storage hardware could become child’s play with this, though. And if it’s as fast and as robust as they say it is, there’s not a whole lot of reason to use something like Veritas. Technically, it sounds like UFS SoftUpdates taken to obvious and highly sensible extremes (and I almost wonder if that’s not exactly what it is).
- Services management framework: yeah, whatever. We’re still going to be writing startup and shutdown scripts, regardless of where you tell us to put them or what config language it’s all in. Nobody’s solved this one (or perhaps everyone’s solved it and nobody’s way is better than anybody else’s).
- Fault management: ok, good error messages and a huge knowledge base could be useful. I don’t much care about a tree structure to the fault hierarchy, but whatever. Making the messages searchable and meaningful is good.
LISA '04
Heading out for LISA ‘04. May post some updates while there, may not…
IHETS Tech Summit
Was at the IHETS Tech Summit in Indy yesterday.
Didn’t get a whole lot out of it other than an update on the ILight2 project, which sounds promising. The network security sessions were a bit underwhelming, and the first of them — network security policies — clearly needed to check out the SANS’ security policy page. The wireless session was also underwhelming, but then we already know that wireless is insecure.
Solaris 9: Managing File Systems
ACM/SLC course.
Starting course; primarily to see what is being offered here.
This was a pretty basic course. I now know how to do everything with disks and filesystems. Decent format for an online course though. Not worth the $100 that I would have had to pay for it were I not in ACM, though. More like $25, if that.
