Dibbler's Net

If the WSJ and other reporting outlets are to be believed then Monday may be the last day of SUN as we have known it. This is an incredibly sad rumor if IBM does buyout Sun. When I first started in computers I was surrounded by IBM with AIX, OS2, and mainframe’s. Over time we saw more Sun systems make it into the corporate world. Over the years I have worked on just about every variety of Unix made. 10 years ago this story wouldn’t have surprised me and might have made sense. However in the past 5 years Sun has really turned around and has become a company of real innovation and growth. Almost daily I visit blogs.sun.com and click on all to scroll through what’s new from an employees perspective. Sun has been continually releasing new software with the new mindset of free or opensource with cost for support, training, or enterprise features. This seems to be working well for them. My fears are similar to what I saw when Symantec bought Veritas. At the time Veritas was king of the hill on many levels of the datacenter. Then when Symantec bought them we saw features drop, employees let go, and the product line ransacked to the point of being a joke. There is no doubt in my mind that if IBM buys Sun we will see the parts that IBM wants folded in and the other 2/3’s be dropped along with the strong talent that Sun has working for them. With the release of opensolaris, free virtualization in both zones and LDOM’s, and a low or no cost software baseline that covers almost every aspect of enterprise needs, there is just nothing that IBM can bring to the table. Sun has been making large leaps in their hardware options as well, becoming highly competitive with almost all other computer makers for the business market. IBM stopped innovating long ago and instead has stuck to a profit line of over charging for old software and weak service.

I don’t see the benefit of this buyout. In the past 5 years I can’t think of any real benefits that have come from the two large company buyout story. It makes sense when the large company buys the small new technology company. That is usually done to help put resources behind a good idea trapped in a small company. However in the cases of large companies it’s more of one company wanting a small part of the other large company and mainly wanting the customer base. There is a big issue with this thinking. IBM and Sun are both large companies that customers already know of. If customers wanted to buy from IBM they would already be customers. Buying the competition does not mean you will get the customers, it only means you will have them for about a year or two as they move to find a new vendor that will meet their needs and not try to buy them.

For the last week I have been thinking about this story, each day I think of another part of Sun that I will miss. I don’t know which vendor will come in to pick up the pieces but in the end I see this as just putting IBM in a more dangerous financial situation and will bring about the conversations about how Sun used to be much like we talk about how UUNet used to be. I have no belief that this comment of mine will make any difference and I was really hoping that this rumor turns out to be false but at this point I have accepted the rumors as true and have started to think about what vendor will I be moving to next. I use Sun hardware and software every day and I will miss the amazing people and the products. Hopefully IBM will not destroy the Sun image and will let it die peacefully but somehow I doubt it.

Sun I will remember you for the company I have known for 20 years. I have seen you beat IBM toe to toe, I have watched you truly morph into a company that had to change to stay alive, and now just when it seems that you are finding your new place in the world it looks like you will be sold, stripped, and left for scrap on the side of the road. To all those Sun employees who I have met and work with I wish you the best and hope that you will land softly. I truly predict that if this purchase goes through we will see 2/3 of the employees let go in the first 2 years and the Sun that we know today will be dead in 3 years. I hope that this doesn’t happen and that this turns out to be a bad rumor but I gave up on lofty dreams in the business world many years ago.

Sun - Feb 24, 1982 to April 6, 2009. Rest in Peace, You will be missed but not forgotten. Timeline

Derrick

Virtualization is the next big thing that we have already done before (think mainframe’s and clock sharing). Sun Solaris has 2.5 versions (Zones and LDOMS) of this that I have been working with a lot lately. When your looking for quick application isolation but full resource sharing and control you use Solaris Zones. The one big issue I had that kept causing me problems was that of routing. If I created a zone that was not on the same subnet as the global zone I had routing issues. Now Sun said you could add multiple entries to the /etc/defaultrouter file but that just didn’t work well. You still needed to have the global zone have an IP on the other subnet or do some more interesting interface tricks to make it work sometimes. Finally with Solaris 10/08 Update 6 they have added a new option. In your zonecfg file you can now specify defrouter as part of the network config portion. This made me smile for a couple of reasons. One it fixed one of the biggest issue I had with zones and usability.  Second it was the fact that this was an issue for a relatively short time period before we saw a fix in the main baseline. It’s because of the opensolaris project and testing that I feel we are seeing these critical fixes and enhancements making it to the commercial baseline so quickly. Thanks to the Sun team and I look forward to seeing more new features soon.

Derrick

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