Dibbler's Net

End of year thoughts, links, and general ramblings.

It’s that time of year again. The time when the major care and feeding of servers, notebooks, and desktops gets done. Cleaning up the hard drives, checking on software updates and finding time to install new items.

First I saw over on my favorite Solaris blog that LDOM 1.1 is now out with nice new features I have been waiting on.

Then Hsphere (or Psoft or Parallels) Finally released hsphere with support for FreeBSD 7. That then spawned the process to update one of my FreeBSD boxes to FreeBSD 7 Release. I tried a new way of upgrading. That failed horribly. Won’t try that way again. Ended up doing a build world and portupgrade by hand to get the upgrade completed. Did learn about a cool FreeBSD feature called libmap. This was a great bit of help and something to remember in the future. I also used the /rescue/cp and ls which are nice non-linked files which are good if you accidentally break your elf library.

I am thrilled to see the ZFS support in FreeBSD but the push that you use 64 bit and a good chunk of memory makes me a bit concerned about how ready it is for everyday use. I am thrilled with ZFS on Solaris 10 and am glad to see it moving to other platforms. Now the big question as to if it will move to Windows.

I also updated a home machine to the new Opensolaris 2008/11 update. It’s working great and the gui for zfs snapshots is cool. I was kind of forced to do this as I broke the previous config. With Opensolaris and coming soon to Solaris is the removal of Root as an actual account. It is changing to a Role instead. This means that if you break you one and only admin account and accidentally remove the root role then you kind of ruin your own day. Word of advice, we were all used to having the root account as a backup, now it’s time to create a secondary account for your backup.

Rumor is that Syngress has finally fixed the web site for the online book information (which I now see under Companion Website when you login). Most of this was due to the timing of our book release happening at the same time as http://www.elsevier.com was moving everything from syngress to them. This caused some issues which is why we created the www.nagios3book.com website just so we could get the data out there promised in the book. Along with that is the VMWare image as well.

Along with all this is the whole end of year time of reflection. What have we learned this year, done this year, and what get’s bumped to the list for next year. I am still a true believer that we are rapidly closing in on the 15 year mainframe cycle. As we see more systems and applications move to the cloud, or virtual systems, and away from the dekstops we are moving back along the circle of computer management. As we come back closer to where I started it is interesting to see how the lessons we learned from the days of mainframes are still applicable today and how so many people have forgotten what we learned back then. I have no doubts that as we move past this renewed mainframe era back to the desktop era it will look nothing like what the first desktop era did, but it will be fun to experience.

In an effort to cover all the subjects at once there is the issue of Security. The past year has been nothing but security nightmares. I personally believe that we are about 1-2 generations away from true personal security making a comeback. It seems that while today’s youth are more technically inclined they are also too willing to sacrifice their entire personal life without due regard. I am curios to see how the first true Myspace generation does when they become the majority of the workforce. We hear small stories every few weeks about employers that check possible applicants online. How will people react when that becomes the norm for everyone. How will we react when half the political candidates are fighting archives of their myspace and you tube videos from 10 and 20 years in the past. We haven’t had a generation yet that truly demanded the right to delete their content off the Internet and it’s now a question of will that even be possible or are we already too late.

It brings to light the numerous books, movies, and futuristic stories about everything online. Will this truly divide people between those who are online and those who avoid it out of fear or desire to maintain privacy. Shows like Ghost in the Shell, the Foundation Series of books, and pretty much half the stories you read in Analog deal with this in some form or fashion. What side of the fence will you land on. I recently read Oath of Fealty and I think it poses a very interesting view of some of the initial issues that a combined society will see.

So with that we end 2008. We welcome 2009 with an understanding that there will be more of the same, and at the same time some new and interesting times. The fun and gadgets should start early with CES but at the same time it will show us how bad the new recession is on the gadget hunters and on Vegas itself.

Derrick

ZFS Hammer or Drill time

So there are a few videos around regarding ZFS and failed drives. Part of what they are showing is how well ZFS as a filesystem deals with 1 and 2 driver failures. This is worlds better than Raid 5 and is a strong point of ZFS.

However these is another side to ZFS that is hard to talk about using a hammer. This is the whole new world of No Partitions. This past month I have been playing with Solaris 10/08 which gave us ZFS as a boot partition for Sparc. I have been waiting for this for about a year and now having played with it I love it. The number of arguments I have had regarding / /opt /var and /usr partitioning in the past have been too many. What works in some places fails miserably in others. Most of the time you become the new owner of a legacy system with partitioning you hate. Add onto this that growing partitions was never really “easy” in the past. Now with ZFS partitions are gone, kaput, dead, no more, and just don’t exist. You have volumes and quota’s but no partitions. While watching one Sun demo the presenter made the comment that when working on ZFS they went with they idea that with any system you can add memory and it’s there. You just start using it. They wanted to do the same with disks. With ZFS they truly have gotten there. There is a learning curve to this and I need to start re-training people that fsck is dead long live scrubbing. But it’s also nice they way Copy on Write is being used with parity to better validate that I just won’t have corrupted data to start. Also the fact that it’s 128 bit file system and very cross platform compatible makes it an easy sell. Now I beg the Sun team to please bring the QFS file sharing into ZFS so I truly have one solution.

If you haven’t read up on ZFS I recommend going to the ZFS Learning Center

Derrick

So about a month ago I upgraded from a T-Mobile wing to the G1. Somehow in the process I missed the requirement for a voice plan as I previously had data only for the wing. So now it’s been about 30 days that I have had the G1 and I wanted to share my personal views on this new phone. Now this is based on both the HTC G1 phone and the android software together. I do look forward to other vendors putting Android on their hardware to see how the platform grows.

The Cons: Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first.
No real headphone jack. I still haven’t plugged in the headphones that came with the phone because the whole usb to headphone idea bothers me. I have heard rumors this will change in the next revision.
No real belt clip. Since I don’t use this as my primary cell phone this hasn’t been a real issue yet. The phone comes with a soft protector but that does not make it very convenient to use as a phone when walking around as it spends time either on the desk or in a pocket.
The mail app. I really thought the Android folks would get email right but not yet. I installed k9 on day one as it supports real delete for imap mailboxes. Hope to see the bundled app improve in this area.

The Pros:
3G service. I have had really no issues receiving 3G service and the speed on the lower edge network works well when 3G is out of range. The auto switching to Wireless Lan’s works really well and I have been impressed with the data services overall.
The browser is much better than the pocketPC version on the wing. While there is room for improvement I find it to be useful and non-frustrating.
The Android Market: I simply love this part. I check it every 1-2 days and browse by date to see what new apps are out there.
Google apps: The Gmail and maps and searching work as advertised and I haven’t had any real issues.
The whole keyboard experience: I need a real keyboard. It’s why I bought the wing and why I waited for this G1. The keyboard works well and doesn’t take from my screen space. A set of keys for arrows would be nice as sometimes I need those and not every app supports the stick. I don’t find an issue with the bump on the right when typing unless I have the power cord plugged in. Then my hands have to conform a bit.
The Touchscreen: It works. Sometimes it has issues where you see that you clicked something but it doesn’t respond. I expect this is just software and will be fixed soon.
The Battery Life: Twice I have had to stop using it because the battery was low. However I really should turn wifi and gps off when I am not using them as I know these are power sinks.

Overall the device is nice. I added in additional memory and I like how everything is setup. I prefer a physical switch for keyboard lockout but the two button combo is a good second place.
The software has performed very well. Much faster than the wing and I don’t spend time waiting. I have had good impressions of the apps I have downloaded and very few have crashed or made the phone unstable. I would and have recommended this device to others especially since it is very usable for remote SSH.

Applications: I have found a lot of cool apps and really good apps. Still need a slingbox player and a few other items but I know those should be coming soon.

Next up. I have installed the SDK and associated software. I know 2 applications that I want to write. Now I just need to find time to actually write them. Once I do I will post the details and my experience with the software side of Android.

Derrick