Monday, August 30, 2010

New SolView

I've just released a new version of SolView. This version cleans up the code used to display SVR4 packaging, and makes a couple of improvements to the Jumpstart profile builder.

Nothing earth-shattering, but I made the list of packages and clusters sorted, which makes it a lot easier to find things. And, to make that less necessary, I implemented recursive removal of packages: if you remove a package, it removes anything that depends on that package as well, keeping the package dependency graph self-consistent.

There are various ways to make sorting work, and I had put together a couple of Comparator classes before doing it properly. The proper way is just to implement Comparable in the classes that need sorting. And in most cases the actual comparison is trivial - we're just comparing the name, which is just a String. (For patches it's a 2-stage numerical comparison of the patch id and revision, but still simple.)

Once Comparable is implemented, then all I need to do is replace Set with TreeSet and everything sorts. Simple, obvious, and something I should have done much earlier.

Of course, there's no point in learning something like this and then only using it the once. So there's a new version of JKstat in which the Kstat class implements Comparable, which immediately gets the output from some of the JKstat demos sorted. (And sorted correctly - there is a specific Comparator in use here, to sort names like sd0 which contain numbers correctly: the numerical part is sorted separately and as a number, so that sd2 comes before sd10.)

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Which snmp on Solaris?

I've just updated Jangle, my java based snmp viewer. Just a presentation tweak: the tree and list now show user-friendly names. For example, ifInOctets rather than 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.10. (Well, I find it easier to read, anyway!)

To be useful, you actually need to be running snmp on the machine you wish to monitor. Which leads me to a question: on Solaris, do you use the system supplied snmp daemon?

And if you do use the system one, is that just for convenience or do you use any of the extra functionality that it provides?

I know that I simply wipe out all the supplied snmp and sma stuff and put my own build of net-snmp in its place.

Friday, August 20, 2010

A new light

While the world of OpenSolaris has been pretty dark and dismal over the last 6 months, a new light has appeared.

The Illumos project, led by Garrett D'Amore, is bringing the OpenSolaris codebase truly into the open. Initially just the base system (ON - kernel and basic utilities), it will be free of encumbered code and capable of self-hosting.

Illumos itself is just a foundation, not a fully-fledged system. It can be taken by others as a basis for distributions and, indeed, there are already efforts to do so. While it's still early days, it's already about as close to being capable of being used to create an independent distribution as the original OpenSolaris source was.

The initial aim was for Illumos to be fully synchronized with the primary source from Oracle. It seems that Oracle have decided to remove themselves from the community by ceasing to make their code available. Such an ill-considered move hurts only Oracle: it frees the community from doubt, allowing it to move ahead freely, and removes any control that Oracle might have. (And it's clear that one thing that Oracle do want is control, so taking a step that eliminates their ability to control is somewhat strange.)

Elsewhere, Oracle's policy of radio silence towards the OpenSolaris community continues. Again, Oracle are harming themselves here - turning supporters into enemies, contributors into competitors. By working with the community rather than antagonizing it, they could have turned it into an asset. Now the outside energy and support that Oracle could have tapped into is being focused into Illumos and its related projects.