Claesson.org

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. 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.

16436日目になりました。

おめでとうございます。（＾＾） 

I just got a copy of the Web 2.0 Fundamentals book by Oswald Campesato and Kevin Nilson. It nicely outlines collection of technologies, tools, products and services to help with delivery of Social Networking and Social Media applications. The book is written in such a way that allows users to quickly get familiar with jargon de jour and to pick the best of breed components for your application stack. It encapsulates multitude of popular technologies including JavaFX, jQuery, JSON, AJAX, and OpenSocial as well as enlists Cloud Computing providers to simplify a deployment scenario. Whether you're revamping your existing applications or starting with the new implementation, the book will definitely help you to get up to speed by providing ways to leverage Social Networking with Google Wave, Yahoo Pipes, and for those developers who enjoy hands on use DTrace to monitor the application performance. I think the book is useful for both developers who want to streamline their application delivery process and entrepreneurs whose goal is to validate a business idea without writing any code. The book is quite easy to read and navigate within and contains myriad of references to follow up on.

What all does an X86 do while net booting and installing?

I often get asked how the OpenSolaris Automated Installer works. The big question is how all the pieces tie together. To help answer these questions I have drafted a few UML sequence diagrams showing the boot process of an X86 type machine net booting and installing via the Automated Installer.

AI Boot Flow Overview

(You can click down the client timeline for relevant links to source code and Wikipedia descriptions of the protocols.)

AI Manifest Selection Flow Detail

(Click the note for a link to the relevant code implementing the AI webserver (which usually runs on http://<ai_server>:46501, http://<ai_server>:46502, etc.) manifest.html page or the note on manifest criteria for Bug 9106 which documents some issues with criteria processing at this time. Otherwise, the rest of the image links to the AI webserver's code implementing manifest.xml.)

They will be speaking on Community and Adaptation at the Tuesday 9:00am EclipseCon keynote, March 23rd. Learn more about the keynote http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/sessions/?page=sessions&id=1601

Oracle activity @ EclipseCon 2010 March 22nd - 25th at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+%40+EclipseCon+2010

I case you hadn't noticed :-) despite the recent transition, JavaOne is indeed happening. The call for papers went out a while ago, and it's it's about to close, so submit your proposal today!. It promises to be a giant year with JavaOne being just a few blocks from Oracle OpenWorld. That few blocks should provide a gap of sanity (opportunity?) between the Geeks and the BizTypes. San Francisco will be bursting at the seams.

With all the excitement and changes associated with the Oracle acquisition of Sun I've been negligent to update the status of some of our ISV Integrations. First we updated our CA Unicenter integrations to 2.2which offers an extensive list of both x86 and SPARC CMT platforms On the provisioning front we also updated Altiris DS to 1.1 and extended the support to more platforms.

DbWrench, which is database design and synchronization software, is clearly an application created on top of the NetBeans Platform:

And, someone out there is making money on the NetBeans Platform in this case, since purchasing this application will cost you $145, while a trial version is also available.

Quite a lot of work seems to have gone into this application, primarily in the porting from a previous incarnation (shown here):

Must be nice, as a developer of this application, to suddenly have a free docking framework out of the box. :-)

Note: Nowhere on the DbWrench website will you see a reference to the NetBeans Platform. Nothing wrong with that. But it clearly means that it's hard to make an estimate about the actual popularity of the NetBeans Platform. However, from the screenshots page one can safely conclude that the NetBeans Platform is broadly adopted across all sectors developing industrial software applications.

Many thanks to Andrea Cisternino for identifying this application as yet another NetBeans Platform application! Others out there? Let me know!

§ I am standing in the election for the OpenSolaris Governing Board one last time (this would be my third consecutive term if elected, so it has to be the last time). Each term has been quite different to the others, and I have no doubt this next year will be very different again for the OpenSolaris community.

Since I no longer work at Sun, I’d like to make clear what my “platform” is in this election in addition to my candidate statement.

• I have been involved in the OpenSolaris project right from the start. While I know where all the bodies are buried, I believe it is better to act on that knowledge by looking to the future.
• I have no corporate affiliation of any kind at present. However, I have previously worked for corporations for nearly 30 years and have an excellent grasp of their metabolism.
• I am a free software advocate and activist, with connections to all parts of the free/open source software movement.
• While I have been a prominent advocate of OpenSolaris and believe the technology it contains is the best available, I am actually platform agnostic and believe in open standards, open source and open communities. Which is good, since OpenSolaris represents an eclectic aggregation of technologies rather than a monoculture…
• My goal at the OGB this year will be to help OpenSolaris become better integrated in the wider open source landscape, rather than standing alone as it has so far.

I encourage you to go vote right now if you are eligible to do so, and most especially to ratify the new OpenSolaris Constitution which I believe is essential if the new OGB is to be able to focus on anything other than bureacracy.

Watching this movie:

(click here to view)

So we get a fair amount of spam posting in our user forums. And by 'fair amount' I mean a lot. Mostly it's the bots trying to create spam accounts, which fails miserably since I'm smarter than they are (today), but sometimes a persistent one actually uses a real email address, and then goes to the trouble of actually authenticating their account so that they can post. Then they have the audacity to post. Mostly they are pointless, harmless, and sometimes even funny.

This one was all of those things. Mostly. (Yeah, I deleted it anyway, and banned said spammer from the forums for being a miscreant, but I always do that.) Anyway, moments after I deleted the post and banned the spammer, Randy Smith forwarded me (via email) his response to the posting, since the post showed up in his RSS feed.

Here's the post:

Date: March 9, 2010 4:41:20 AM PST
Subject: Sun SPOT Manager | How do you make sunspots
Reply-To: alexeena <alexeenasaluja-AT-gmail-DOT-com>
Source: SunSpotWorld.com
Author: alexeena <alexeenasaluja-AT-gmail-DOT-com>


How do you make sunspots on the face go away? I've had one sunspot on my face for about 2 1/2 months and several other sunspots on my face for a bout a month. Please tell me a way that actually makes sunspots go away. Thank you.

Statistics : Posted by alexeena • on Tue Mar 09, 2010 1:41 am • Replies 0 • Views 2

And here's the response I got from Randy in my email:

Ok, so maybe it's not funny to you, but I actually LOLed. Yes, out loud and everything.

An in-depth look with George Wilson of Oracle's ZFS team.

download for iPod here

filmed & edited by Deirdré Straughan

An in-depth look with George Wilson of Oracle's ZFS team.

download for iPod here

filmed & edited by Deirdré Straughan

It's about time sysadmins got their due:

Devotion to Duty

(Thank you, Josh Simons.)

- Rick

Kinamik Data Integrity is a software company focused on data integrity, whose mission is to provide an easy answer to a tough question: how do I know the digital records I am looking at are correct?

Kinamik develops the Secure Audit Vault software solution that centralizes and preserves sensitive data; by applying a digital fingerprint to the secured records, it makes them tamper-evident and provides proof that the sealed data has not been manipulated from the moment of its creation. In a context of increasingly stringent compliance requirements, the Kinamik Secure Audit Vault helps organizations in regaining the trustworthiness of their data. The Kinamik innovative R&D has been recognized by several awards including the 2007 Red Herring Top 100 Europe.

Already a partner of Sun and Oracle --Kinamik is a member of the Sun Partner Advantage, Sun Startup Essentials and Oracle Partner Network programs--, Kinamik joined the OpenSolaris community in 2009 and contributed to Sun´s development efforts on the audit_remote plugin by collaborating in the testing processes and providing bug reports to Sun's team.

This plugin enables the secure transmission of audit trails to a remote storage, which would prevent an intruder who compromised a system from being able to delete the audit trail of that system. Kinamik developed the receiver part that allows the audit trails to be secured and stored in real time within their product, the Kinamik Secure Audit Vault. This Sun-Kinamik combined solution provides end-to-end trust in the audit information. As far as we know, this is the only product that has done that.

There are two key points to note about the Solaris Audit Remote / Kinamik Secure Audit Vault combined solution:

1. Audit events are made cryptographically tamper-evident in real time, as they are generated. This reduces significantly and virtually eliminates the security gap in which any manipulation goes undetected, regardless of access controls privileges: even administrators of applications, OS or databases cannot make a single change without being detected. In contrast, all other solutions are batch processes, which means that they add integrity protection at the end of the day or after specific periods of time. As a result, they may be protecting data that has been already tampered with.
2. End-to-end security trust is achieved with the use of the combined audit_remote plugin in OpenSolaris and the Kinamik Secure Audit Vault. By providing assurances that data is cryptographically tamper-evident from data generation through to long-term retention, storage and archiving, organizations are able to able to reduce risk of unwanted manipulation.
   

We are looking today for organizations and users that can assess this solution, providing us some feedback on desired improvements, capabilities, features and functions. If you are interested in supporting this initiative, please contact Nadeem Bukhari at Kinamik or download directly a virtual appliance with the product at http://www.kinamik.com/opensolaris --the current version of the Kinamik Secure Audit Vault product is also capable of supporting syslog, log4j, JDBC applications, text files and Weblogic Audit trails.

Following the example of Kinamik, we are finally encouraging the software vendors and the software developers at large to join the OpenSolaris community in the spirit of --and for the business merits of-- open innovation.

"Extending the Kinamik Secure Audit Vault's capabilities for working with OpenSolaris effectively allows Kinamik to embrace open innovation. By working with the OpenSolaris community we have expedited the development of a solution to address an emerging but significant business problem. These efforts would have taken much longer to come to fruition without the imaginative power of this creative network of developers and users all around the world. We look forward to collaborating with them to find new and exciting uses for the common solution provided by the Kinamik Secure Audit Vault and OpenSolaris."
Roberto Blanc, Marketing Director, Kinamik Data Integrity

Two weeks ago, my small home-server died (I assume, of heat, but am not sure, as it had been running more than a year without glitches, still it’s dead).

As I also wanted to upgrade it regardless, this is a good time to do so…

So, my new preferences are:

• Disks no longer attached externally via USB. (USB 2.0 isn’t as fast as SATA)
• Less power draw (5 external PSUs aren’t that efficient)
• All in one chassis (less waste of space, possibly also a bit better noise reduction)
• Still IDE for the boot disk

So, in order to have the 4 disks directly attached via SATA (all my 4 USB disks are internally SATA, so I will detach them from their cases, and attach them directly to the SATA ports on a new motherboard) I need a board that has at least 4 SATA ports.

I also wanted to stick with Intel Atom (although, if they would add VT-x support, I would really appreciate that! But that’s not yet a real requirement, so I can live without that feature).

From the new Atoms the N450 or N470 Atoms aren’t useful to me, as these CPUs are 32-bit only. So, in order to be able to do a bit more than pure NAS, I want the new D510 CPU.

To that effect, I was scanning the new Intel Atom D510 boards. There aren’t many yet (the Asus not yet buyable), the Gigabyte, the Jetway, or the Zotac being the ones, that do fulfill my current needs.

When I ordered my new board, I was not aware of the Gigabyte board. And the Zotac has WiFi, which I was not willing to pay for, as well as the fact, that it uses Mini-DTX, and not Mini-ITX (OK, not a big issue!). From the Jetway, I love the fact, that it does not need a PSU, as I can run it with a standard external Laptop 12V PSU, which I already have from my old setup.

So, yesterday, I did order the Jetway NC96-510-LF board. The nice thing is: I can re-use the RAM from the old board, as well as the external PSU. I also hope to not need to re-install the OS-disk, as this board seems very close to the old Intel board. I hope, a reconfigure boot will solve that…

So, now, my only concern is a new chassis…

Requirements for that are:

• Mini-ITX capable
• No PSU
• Hosting 4 x 3.5″ disks
• Hosting 1 x 2.5″ disk (my 1.8″ disk is mounted to a 2.5″ adapter)
• Low noise fan (if at all!)

Any recommendations for such a case?

Matthias

Yesterday morning the USERS mailing list of GlassFish had a thread asking How to start and run GlassFishV3 without Netbeans... so, Alexis wrote and posted a quick Survival Guide on using GlassFish without an IDE .

From question to documentation in a few hours: self-publishing, no webmaster to contact, all links to online documentation... and no lawyer to check with :-)