Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Migrating old servers

Buried in a far recess of some organisations you'll find some really old systems. I've just acquired a new playground - not a Solaris 10 box in sight. What I do have is a lot of much older stuff, going back to:

SunOS jawdropped 5.5.1 Generic_103640-29 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-1
SunOS gobsmacked 5.6 Generic_105181-39 sun4m sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-10

Ouch! I thought I had long seen the last of such hardware or Solaris versions.

Now, Solaris has excellent binary compatibility. I have some old SunOS 4 binaries from the 1980s that I use on a daily basis. So I'm expecting to be able to take a lot of what's present and simply move it onto new systems.

I'm also planning on using Solaris Containers to help make the transition easier. I would much prefer to do a proper move of the application to a newer system, but that takes time. The advantage of the Containers approach is that you can lift up a working system lock, stock, and barrel, and migrate the whole lot in one fell swoop - otherwise it can be quite a lot of effort to cleanly extract an application from an old (and usually undocumented) system.

Unfortunately there isn't a Containers implementation for Solaris 7, 2.6, or 2.5.1. So those have to be done the hard way.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

java + picl = fail

Solaris has PICL - the Platform Information and Control Library - as a mechanism for storing and retrieving platform-specific information. It's structured as a tree, so a natural thought would be to load the information into java and use a swing JTree to present a graphical representation. (And would make a nice add-on to SolView.)

I wrote such a tool several years ago. It uses JNI to interface with the native libpicl, and it never worked properly. It still doesn't work properly - it crashes far more often than not. The crashes are consistent in the sense that if it crashes on a machine it will always crash in the same place (retrieving the same object from the picl tree), but are random in the sense that apparently nonsensical changes to the code will either kill or cure it.

Anyway, I'm just tossing it out there. It's called piclbrowser, and is available here. Anyone's free to take this and play with it, and is welcome to try and fix it.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Appalling Virgin "Broadband"

I've had a home broadband connection from Virgin - formerly NTL - at home for years. Until recently, the quality of the service was excellent - I could almost always get the full quoted speed, and we only had the occasional minor outage.

Recently, though, the connection has been terrible. It's been several weeks, almost a month now. I'm supposed to get 10M/s (that's 10 megabits). Trying the various speed tests that are available - including the ones recommended by Virgin themselves - and I get 5% at best, usually rather less. And I suspect that those aren't telling the full picture, as the actual rate I'm getting in practice is worse. Web pages can take minutes to load. Watching TV programmes or gaming is simply a non-starter. I tried downloading something an hour ago and it's not even managed to get a single byte yet. Packet loss is 10% and up. It's not usage or time dependent.

(Fortunately, gmail seems to remain moderately responsive, but pretty much anything else is essentially down. Attempting to actually work from home is a disaster.)

Virgin Media's online support is awful. For starters, their web form is completely incapable of working out who you are even if you're logged in - so you have to fill in all sorts of account details. The first one I sent was acknowledged and then ignored. The next one got a standardized answer. I did what was asked, got given some more things to try, and did those too. (My connection is sufficiently poor that some of the tests don't even work.) The no response in over a week. No response to my following up.

So I tried the telephone. Oh dear. After the usual rigmarole of giving them every single piece of information they already know we go through the standardized script. Have I rebooted the modem? Tried that, several times. Have I rebooted my computer? Yes. Have I checked for spyware? Yes. Am I running XP or Vista? Well, I have both, and they're slow as well, but they can't even spell Solaris. Can I run a speed test? I try that, and get almost 5% of what I'm paying for, which is actually better than most of the times I've tried.

The poor chap then has the temerity to tell me that my broadband connection is working perfectly, and that I need to call the PC helpline who'll help me fix the problem with my computer. I think I managed to stay civilized throughout the resulting exchange.

It's possible that there's a problem somewhere in the house, of course. I've tried to exclude that, and can't, because the test required to do that - direct connection of a machine into the modem - simply fails completely. I regard that as an interesting data point, but I'm only a sysadmin not a call-centre automaton reading from a script.

Faced with a combination of a terrible broadband connection, and useless customer service, I investigated alternative providers. Which leaves me stuck between a rock and a hard place, because my house must be a long way from the nearest exchange, so that using the BT line (which is the only other connectivity option) would take me down to 3M if I'm lucky. And I really do need the 10M I'm paying for.

Grrrr.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

SNMP from java - updated

I've just uploaded Jangle 0.05, a minor update to my graphical java snmp client.

It's not just graphical now; I've added an snmpwalk subcommand to walk the snmp tree from the command line.

There's also the normal clutch of bug fixes and general code improvements.

One thing I've been playing with is trying to automate discovery of relationships. The snmp information is stored in a tree, but the last two nodes in the tree are inverted. Consider ifInOctets as an example: it has a child node for each interface, as does ifOutOctets. So just looking at ifInOctets gives you a list of interfaces, whereas what you really want is to generate a list of interfaces and then get all the data for that interface. You can get this by parsing MIB files, but I would like to be able to do this just by looking for patterns in the OID tree, and then look at the MIB afterwards to describe the structure. (One thing I want to avoid is having to ship all the MIBs for every possible device.)

OpenSolaris Constitution Update

The OpenSolaris Constitution is known to have a number of flaws. It's not well matched to the way the community actually works; it conflates local functional roles with global governance roles; and it's relatively long and complex.

At the last annual election, a revised constitution was proposed that aimed to eliminate those shortcomings - greatly simplified and separating governance from operations. It failed to pass. (Only narrowly, but it failed.)

The current OpenSolaris Governing Board decided early in its term of office that we would again offer a revised constitution to the OpenSolaris community, after taking an opportunity to correct any errors or issues that community members might be concerned about.

As announced, revisions to the constitution are now available for comment, and we invite all interested OpenSolaris community members to send us their comments. (Reviewing the release notes would be a sensible starting point.)

Sunday, October 04, 2009

SolView 0.48

It looks like my SolView 0.47 announcement was a tad premature. Testing was somewhat incomplete.

Version 0.48 fixes the problem, and is now available.

(The technical goof I made is like this: the solview wrapper script sets things like the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and CLASSPATH. However, if you just run solview with no arguments it pulls the CLASSPATH out of the jar file manifest instead. I had updated the wrapper correctly, but forgotten the manifest. I normally run the individual views in isolation, so hadn't noticed that one of the jar files was missing, resulting in the process view generating a stack trace rather than the useful output it was supposed to.)

So, to anyone who grabbed 0.47, you'll want to get 0.48. Sorry about that.