Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Fixed funny fonts in gpdf

If you're running Solaris 10 on x86, you may have noticed that some PDF documents (particularly, and somewhat ironically, those generated by Sun) display as garbage. Instead of readable text you get rubbish - rather like this:



What you need is the recently released patch 119813-06, which fixes bug 6375381. (That's the original bug, which shows it got fixed in nevada ages ago - 2147903 is the one that tracks Solaris 10 integration.)

So now it looks like this - a vast improvement:

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

That's a busy disk...

From iostat -xnz 1 on my desktop:

r/s w/s kr/s kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t %w %b device
0.0 3.0 0.0 10.5 18444348816.8 18444348816.8 6148914691236.1 \
6148914691236.1 1844434881679 1844434881679 c1d0

Sorry if it wraps too much.

Of course, those numbers look very suspicious. I have seen this sort of silliness several times in iostat output recently though.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Sunsolve needs a makeover

Sunsolve is an excellent resource. I don't have any issues with the content - it's great stuff.

Where I do have problems is with it's reliability and performance. I couldn't get through at all for a while over the weekend, and often have problems with my automated patch scripts - which can time out, report 500 errors, or tell me I'm unauthorized, all at random, and have been that way for a long time.

I even got the following gem off the website just now:


Come on Sun - show us how good your stuff really is by making your own sites work well!

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Fingered!

I found this nugget on indiana-discuss to be quite apt:
one of the keys to identifying old-time Unix admins, particularly of the SunOS persuasion, is their use of tcsh
Yup. That's got my number!