So what is wrong with SVR4 packaging, really?

So, as might be predicted I suppose, some people wilfully disregarded the thrust of my argument, and turned it into a debate over specific packaging technologies.

OK, so that brings us to the question: what is so bad about SVR4 packaging, really?

I could go on for pages. One of the reasons I found OpenSolaris attractive was the prospect of being able to fix all the bad things with Installation and Packaging in Solaris. Let's takes some of the comments though:

old and clunky

Guilty as charged. Really, it is old. It is clunky. It's been neglected and unloved. It needs fixing. Those reasons alone aren't enough to dismiss it - the key question should be whether it can actually do the job.

missing lots of features

OK, so what features does dpkg have that SVR4 packaging doesn't? That's really the comparison - versus the dpkg or rpm commands.

enabler of dim-sum patching

Completely and utterly false. The problem with Solaris patching lies fairly and squarely in the domain of patching. This could trivially be solved without any changes to tools - either deliver whole packages, or simply institute a policy saying that you can't deliver changes to a package (or related set of packages) in independent patches. This is a process problem, not something inherent to the underlying package system.

---

Then there are more material objections:

no repository support

Actually, SVR4 packaging does have the ability to fetch and install packages from remote locations. (A crippling limitation of IPS is that it can't do anything else.) What's wrong with this picture is the lack of repositories - blastwave aside. Wouldn't it have been easier to simply make existing packages available on a web site, without having to retool everything?

lack of dependency resolution

As the success of dpkg/apt demonstrates, having your underlying packager do all the work is neither necessary nor desirable. What that does demonstrate is the requirement for more powerful tools above the base packager. Actually, separating the fancy interface from the tools doing the low-level work is probably a really good thing - it enables compatibility of the system over time even if the higher-level tools change, and it enables innovation by allowing independent components to be developed independently.

arbitrary scripting

Actually, one of the key weaknesses of SVR4 packaging is not that it supports scripting, but that the support it offers is pretty poor. there is no real support - there ought to be a strong scripting framework with a well-defined environment, and predefined functionality for common tasks. Oh, and trigger scripts would be nice. Banning scripting (yet allowing it to sneak in through the back door) fails to solve the problem, and encourages bad workarounds.

poor package names

The actual package names are pretty much immaterial. Assigning real significance to them would be false. What matters is that they're unique and follow a scheme. As a user, you might want to install "php" - all that means is that the software studies the package metadata and works out what packages to really install. Actually having a pcakge with that name isn't necessary, and probably not even desirable (it locks you into current names and prevents evolution).

---

So, beyond a recognition in the codebase that the 21st century has arrived, and the lack of an apt-get/synaptic style front-0end - all of which could fairly easily be remedied - what is really wrong with SVR4 packaging?

JKstat 0.32

Friday the 13th, and I wonder whether to hold off for a day.

But no, another JKstat release comes out.

Nothing major here, still the continuing cleanup process. The one change here is better exception handling, particularly in Client-Server mode. It's not perfect, by any means, but in the past I just dropped errors and exceptions straight in the bin.

The reason for doing so was that I wasn't keen on declaring Exceptions to be thrown - it seriously clutters up the whole API. But Fabrice Bacchella (thanks!) pointed out the obvious, that if I were to throw a RuntimeException then I wouldn't have to declare that I threw it. So the fix is to create a subclass of RuntimeException and throw that, and consumers that need to know can check for that (and can check for the specific failure - RuntimeException is far too generic).

Into the sunset?

The announcement to EOL Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) was telegraphed well in advance, and we're coming to the end of the road with only a handful of planned releases left to look forward to.

But, is this just the end of the road for SXCE, or is it something bigger that's at stake here?

Read the Sun marketing and you might believe this is a glorious new dawn for the Solaris/OpenSolaris world. The reality may be more like sailing off into the sunset and disappearing from view.

The fundamental difference between the old and the new is instalation and packaging, which have been ripped out wholesale and been incompatibly replaced. Even if the replacements had been perfect (and, quite frankly, they fall a huge distance short) this would have been a huge challenge. Organisations (and individuals) are under huge pressure to retrench and consolidate. Adding additional technologies that they're expected to support is an uphill battle. Adding brand new (and essentially untested) technologies that they're going to have to learn from scratch makes it doubly hard.

If the next version of Solaris had been based around SXCE, with traditional deployment technologies - traditional packaging and jumpstart - then customers would have been able to start rolling it out tomorrow. Everything a customer knew, all their existing investment in skills and tools, would be preserved. New customers would be able to leverage the skills and expertise of existing customers. All the great features and functionality present in OpenSolaris would be there to be taken advantage of.

Contrast that with the planned OpenSolaris transition. You have to retrain all your staff, replace your entire toolset, rebuild your entire systems deployment and administration infrastructure. Most environments are heterogeneous, so this means you now have an entire extra set of infrastructure to support - you aren't going to transition everything to the new scheme immediately, so you're going to have to shoulder the burden of supporting the extra scheme in parallel for years. Isn't the most likely course of action for a cash-strapped IT
department with a CIO breathing down their neck to simply reject that and migrate everything over to RHEL?

Solaris and OpenSolaris contain fantastic technologies that make them a great choice for IT departments - ZFS, Crossbow, CIFS support, zones (especially sparse root zones), Dtrace, and many more - but by making deployment such an unattractive proposition we're making it far less likely that customers will try or use these technologies, and are giving organizations and managers every excuse to ignore Solaris and OpenSolaris as an option.

The best thing Oracle could do for Solaris and OpenSolaris would be to scrap the OpenSolaris distribution (but not the rest of OpenSolaris) and redirect our energies into building a better Solaris based on SXCE. If not, then I fear that Solaris will ride off into the sunset and be consigned to the wastebasket of superior technologies that failed due to bad strategic decisions, and that's a prospect that truly saddens me.

Tinkering with the SVR4 packaging source

Take one look at the SVR4 packaging source in Solaris/OpenSolaris and it's clear that it's suffering from serious neglect. It's old. It's fragile. It's had stuff bolted onto the side over and over until it's a wonder that it works at all.

Yet, it's survived for the best part of two decades and every Solaris system uses it.

I recently had to fix up some packages on Solaris 10 that were in the deadly embrace of webstart. If you tried to remove them with prodreg, it said "oh no, you must use pkgrm", yet when you tried to use pkgrm it said "oh no, you must use prodreg".

So, we have access to the source, right? And, while I could have manually gone in and wiped out the errant packages by hand, I had a look at the SVR4 source to see if I could put together a version that actually did what it was told.

This was pretty easy. It took a little effort to get enough together that would compile cleanly on Solaris 10 again. And, having done that, and solved the initial problem, I did a bit more tinkering to remove some of the more obviously redundant code and apply some of the performance improvements that are sorely needed.

After thinking up a meaningless acronym, I've made the code I have available here: SPRATE. You're free to use it; anyone feeling masochistic enough to work on it is free to contact me.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

JProc 0.2

I've been doing a little more work on JProc - a java jni interface to the Solaris procfs filesystem - to make it a little more complete and robust.

This has reached a convenient stopping point, so I've released version 0.2.

There are a couple of features that have been lifted from JKstat, namely the idea (and parts of the implementation thereof) that it's useful to manage a Set of processes as a unit, and that it's useful to be able to filter on process characteristics.

As a start, I've added filtering by user and zone. The demo application now has dropdown lists of users and zones, so you can select processes owned by a user, or running in a specific zone (or both) interactively. (They don't currently update as the list of users and zones changes - that's work left for the future.)

I've also added lookups of username, group, and zone name. This is a simple jni interface to getpwnam and friends.

One other feature I added was to convert a project id to a name. This proved rather more entertaining, as I discovered that the lookup functions are buried off in libproject rather than libc. While that of itself isn't necessarily an issue, libproject drags in quite a lot of subsidiary libraries. While in normal use they use lazy loading so that you don't drag in the extra libraries until you need them, it looks like jni drags them all in regardless. I'm not sure how useful project name/id lookups are going to be, so I may simply remove that bit of functionality.

SolView 0.47

One of the things I've been trying to do with SolView is to provide a user with multiple views of a Solaris system from all angles. I'm not going to claim I've succeeded, but I've released another SolView update with a couple of new features.

The first is to add charts from JKstat that show behaviour over time - visible in the processor and network view. I've put quite a bit into the chart support in JKstat, and was pleased that it was so easy to use it to add charts to SolView. (It's not entirely perfect - it would be nice if the colors in the cpu chart matched the cpustate widget, for example. And it's a shame that I don't collect history so that each time you look at a chart it starts from scratch.)

The second is a Process view from JProc. Which is what I wrote JProc for in the first place.

Apart from that there's the usual raft of bugfixes, and there's a little more polish. Enjoy!

JKstat - interactive chart builder

In the latest update to JKstat I've introduced a new piece of functionality I've been wanting to get done for a while.

JKstat is pretty good at producing charts, but - until now - you've either had to take what it gives you or delve into the code. No longer. As of version 0.30, if you

./jkstat chartbuilder

you'll get a window just like this:


A kstat can be selected from the tree; you can then choose the statistic or statistics of interest, and then get a chart of either the rates of change or the values of the chosen statistic(s).

You can also choose whether to produce a line chart of the various statistics, or a stacked chart, with statistics in solid color stacked atop each other.

You can then choose whether to just show this individual instance of a kstat, or to show all the available instances (so you can, for example, produce a chart showing all the disks or all the cpus, just by picking one).

And you can decide whether to show the individual kstats, or whether to show an aggregate over all the kstats.

So, the following chart is generated by selecting cpu:0:sys from the tree, checking all instances, and asking for an aggregated, stacked chart of the cpu_nsec_idle, cpu_nsec_user, and cpu_nsec_kernel statistics, showing the relative proportions of user, system, and idle time on my system.



(If you're interested, the spike of user activity at about 21:19 is a build running; the huge splodge of kernel time just after 21:27 is VirtualBox starting up a VM.)

Everything Virtual

Virtualization is one of those hot IT topics, but the reality is that - in the general sense - virtualization has been around for what seems like forever.

I define virtualization as the abstraction of logical resources away from physical resources.

For example, NFS (the Network File System) allows you to access your data from any system, not just the one that happens to be physically connected to the disks on which the data is stored.

The X Window System allows you to display applications on a different host to the one where they might be running.

VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is one of many technologies that allow you to access a complete desktop on a different system to that where it's running.

The various types of Virtual Desktops supported by X11 window managers allow you to manage and display applications independently of the physical screen that you may be sitting in front of.

Solaris Zones allow you to construct an operating system instance that, while in any particular instantiation is locked to a piece of hardware, is logically distinct. It's relatively trivial to pack up a Zone, redeploy it on new hardware, and the application layer doesn't notice. Again, a level of abstraction from the physical.

Interestingly, the current virtualization fad doesn't quite work the way you would expect based on the definition I started with. Looking at the various virtual machine technologies currently in vogue, while the virtual machines are abstract from the underlying hardware, the abstraction that's presented to the user is that of physical systems. This doesn't introduce anything new, it just gives us the same old IT infrastructure we've always had, just replicated one layer up in the stack. Useful, but not revolutionary.

And the cloud doesn't really change that, because all you're getting with a cloud is an extra layer (and a whole new charging model) underneath your virtualization layer. Everything may be virtual, but in many cases all we're doing is finding new ways to implement the physical.

xfce-taskmanager on Solaris

XFCE has a little task manager application. It's not top or prstat, but it's reasonably lightweight and integrated.

(It also allows you to click on a column heading to sort. That's one of the things that JProc does as well and that you take for granted in a graphical application.)

The original task manager was linux-specific, and the way it wandered through /proc was never going to work on Solaris. But it was easy enough to produce a Solaris version that seems to work well enough for me. Source here.

JProc - procfs from java

As if accessing kstats from Java wasn't enough, I've recently been playing with accessing process information - specifically the /proc filesystem on Solaris - from java. Thus was born JProc.

The idea, eventually, is to link this with JKstat and SolView to give a more complete view of what's happening on a Solaris system.

The obligatory screenshot:



I think the correct description here is "work in progress".

Sane terminal behaviour with PgUp and friends

In gnome-terminal on Solaris 10, if you hit the PgUp key, it scrolls the window up. The PgDn, Home, and End keys similarly move the scrollbar.

That's the behaviour I want. It's also what you've traditionally had with xterm, dtterm, and the like.

Recently, it's become fashionable to pass PgUp and friends through to the application, so you get the application running inside the terminal emulator to do its own interpretation, and require the shift key to be pressed in order to get the terminal window itself to scroll.

I find that incredibly disruptive. I don't run anything inside a terminal that does its own scrolling (other than more, and I don't need to reach as far as the PgUp key to manipulate that). Most of the more advanced applications I run are graphical anyway.

So, how to fix? In my exploration of xfce, the Terminal application uses a newer version of vte which suffers from the above problem. So I set out to fix it, and it was relatively simple.

I used vte-0.20.5, and if you look at around line 5055 of vte.c, you'll see some code that looks like:

  case GDK_KP_Page_Up:
  case GDK_Page_Up:
   if (modifiers & GDK_SHIFT_MASK) {
    vte_terminal_scroll_pages(terminal, -1);
    scrolled = TRUE;
    handled = TRUE;
    suppress_meta_esc = TRUE;
   }
   break;

simply remove the test for the shift:

  case GDK_KP_Page_Up:
  case GDK_Page_Up:
   vte_terminal_scroll_pages(terminal, -1);
   scrolled = TRUE;
   handled = TRUE;
   suppress_meta_esc = TRUE;
   break;

for all four keys of interest, and rebuild.

My life is so much better as a result.

It's a shame that's not the default, but there are others who rely on the opposite behaviour. It would be nice if it was customizable - it's OK for me to build a separate copy for my own use on my own machine, but that's not very flexible. It would be neat if it could autodetect the terminal mode and do the right thing.

XFCE on Solaris 10

I'm getting somewhat unsatisfied with the various desktop environments available. The desktop is currently in the doldrums, presenting a dull and dreary landscape.

So, I thought I would give XFCE another look. OK, so it turns out that it is a little bit of work to get it running on Solaris 10. There's a bunch of prerequisites that you need to build first, and a couple of tweaks. So it was a bit tedious, but I got it to work fairly easily. My install notes are available to help others down the same path.

What I've got is essentially functional. I've not worked out why some of the menu and application icons don't appear, and a few of the window manager themes don't quite work (you get strange visual artifacts) but it's functional, meets my requirements (which may be different from other people) of being easy to use, has a reasonable choice of themes, isn't quite as heavyweight as some of the other desktops, and shows promise for the future.

Testing ZFS compression

One of my servers (it's a continuous build server) generates a significant amount of logfiles. About 150G so far, growing at over a gigabyte each day.

Now, logfiles tend to be compressible, so in preparation for migrating it to a new host (it's a zone, so moving from one physical host to another is trivial) I tested ZFS compression to see how well that would work.

Type	Ratio
lzjb	5.08x
gzip	22.19x
gzip-1	16.37x

Now, the default lzjb gives you fair compression. That saves 80% of my storage, so that's pretty good.

Going to gzip compression the space saving is spectacular. Unfortunately the machine runs like it's stuck in treacle, so that's not exactly practical.

Which is why I tried gzip-1. You save much more space than lzjb, although not as much as the default gzip (which is gzip-6). Unfortunately, while the machine doesn't quite go as comatose as it does with the regular gzip compression, the performance impact is still noticeable.

Overall, while I wouldn't mind the extra compression, the performance impact makes it hard, so I'm going to stick with the regular lzjb.

JKstat, meet JavaFX

One of the announcements out of CommunityOne was the availability of JavaFX for Solaris and OpenSolaris - if you're lucky enough to be running on x86, anyway.

So the first thing that occurred to me was - could I use JavaFX to make a graphical front-end to JKstat?

(And the same thought occurred to Ben Rockwood as well, who asked me how easy it would be and pushed the thought from idle fancy to a must try, especially after I glibly said - "sure, dead easy".)



So the above image is jcpustate using the JKstat core api rendered with JavaFX. Of itself, it's nothing fancy, but it's served its purpose: I've got a rudimentary understanding of JavaFX out of it; I've worked out how to integrate JKstat amd JavaFX; and this validates that the JKstat core api does its job.

You can now download JKstat 0.29. Look in the jkstatfx directory, the source code for the above example is JCpuStateFX.fx.

I had a couple of issues getting this to work. I found I had to put the jni shared library (libkstat_jni.so) directly into the right javafx lib directory - setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH didn't seem to work. The other was that JavaFX doesn't natively support either java Collections or Generics. It clearly understands them - because it tracks the types of the objects in my Collections correctly (and it doesn't understand how to cast objects back toi the right type either). I ended up having to use the toarray(T[] a) method to create a Sequence of the right type.

I have to say that this wasn't the feature I had originally planned for this version of JKstat. I've been working on an interactive chart builder so you're not limited to the fixed and limited set of charts that JKstat creates on its own, but that will have to wait a while for the next release.

Heading off to CommunityOne

Need to start packing as I'm off to CommunityOne.

It's going to be a busy week. Starting off, Sunday I'll be at the Open HA Cluster Summit, on Monday is CommunityOne, and the OGB will be out in force. If you're around, there's an OGB Town Hall at 6pm, before the OpenSolaris party.

Tuesday there's more CommunityOne, including the Deep Dives and the Crossbow BOF, then on Wednesday I'm hoping to meet up with the OSUG Bootcamp.

And, perhaps the most important thing about getting to events like this, I hope to meet as many people as possible in the few days I'm there.

Reports from the community for CommunityOne

The OGB will be at CommunityOne in a few weeks. If you would like to get involved, there's still time (just) to register - OpenSolaris will have a big presence!

On the Monday, June 1st, we're holding a Town Hall at 6pm, and we invite any and all members of the OpenSolaris community to come along, meet us, talk to us, give us feedback about OpenSolaris and how we the OGB can help in making the OpenSolaris community better.

(It's somewhat unfortunate that there's something else going on at 6pm that involves free alcohol or something like that. Hard choice, huh?)

As part of the OGB presence at CommunityOne, we're looking to display reports from communities, projects, and user groups that make up our community. What I'm thinking of here is lots of individual highlight slides we can put on display boards (so they ought to be self-contained on a single page). Bullet points, and pictures make it look better. I'll also put them all together into a single presentation (we might have that running in a permanent loop on a screen, for example) that anyone can take and use.

Longer term, I see this as a first run of a regular reporting process. The OpenSolaris community is doing great work, and we ought to all be aware of the great work that's going on and highlighting our achievements so they're more widely known.

What can the OGB do for you?

It's a great honour to be elected to the OGB, and I want to thank everyone who took the trouble to vote.

So, what is the OGB going to do this year?

Let's start by looking at the Charter. This defines what the OGB has to do. And if you look at that, then the job of the OGB - above all else - is to construct and maintain the OpenSolaris Constitution. Much of the Charter is about the Constitution, and there's also quite a bit about the structure of the OGB itself (and a lot of that is the initial bootstrapping of the OGB when the OpenSolaris community was created and we started with the CAB).

Past that, the OGB then manages the community according to the Constitution. There are clear problems with the current Constitution, which is why a revised version was proposed. Having failed to pass, we're going to have to do something, because the current Constitution is a obstacle that's getting in the way of developing the community, but how we deal with that is another matter.

Note that the OGB is quite constrained in its operations. Both the Charter and the Constitution are reasonably specific about what we are supposed to do. In particular, it's pretty explicitly clear that the OpenSolaris we govern is not OpenSolaris the Sun distribution, nor is it OpenSolaris the codebase, it's just the OpenSolaris community.

However, I'm going to interpret the Charter slightly more broadly. At the beginning, it says to manage and direct an OpenSolaris community in its efforts to improve upon and advocate in favor of OpenSolaris. There are two phrases there that are key.

The first is manage and direct - and clearly we the OGB cannot in fact direct any member of the community to do anything. What we can do is put into place management processes that will allow the community to do its work more easily; it's up to the community to use them. One of the things we have talked about (it's come up before, but I think we want to push it again) is some level of reporting. We should expect every structural part of the community to produce regular status reports, so that we know what's going on. At the very least, that a project or community is still alive. Beyond that, these reports would promote wider awareness of what each group is doing, and would also give groups an opportunity to make bottlenecks known so that they can be acted upon. There are problems that are well known already, and we need to make sure that progress in those areas is maintained - and is more visible so that people don't think the problems are being ignored.

The second key phrase is advocate, and I would like to see the OGB more prominent as advocates and champions of OpenSolaris. On a personal note, this is difficult for a quiet reserved Englishman such as myself, but it needs doing. And at least some of the other OGB members (I'm not going to say all, because I certainly can't presume I can speak for them) feel that the OGB should be taking a more active role. If we don't, then call us to account.

Going back to the title - and given the limitations on the real power that the OGB has - what can the OGB do for you?

Backups done right?

I'm fed up with NetBackup. It vaguely works most of the time, but not all (which makes it difficult to justify it as a backup solution). And it's sucking up a lot of time - management and configuration takes a lot of work.

My experience with Legato has been great. It's incredibly easy to manage, just works, and sits there in the background without needing me to constantly mother it. It's not perfect - the latest java-based GUI is pretty horrid, and my experience of it in non-unix (ie. Windows) environments is that it's a duck out of water.

So, I'm looking around. I'll probably give Amanda a whirl. So if anyone has experience of both Amanda (or Zmanda) *and* one or both the above options, then feel free to comment - I'm particularly interested in comparisons.

Newer != Better

We all know that just because something is new doesn't mean that it's better than what's gone before. A couple of examples I've had the misfortune to experience first-hand recently emphasize this:

Firefox 3 is dramatically inferior to Firefox 2. Not only does it feel much more sluggish, but the URL bar (in particular the drop-down menu) is terrible. Yes, the oldbar extension removes some of the maddening irritations of the look and feel, but the list of URLs presented is completely broken, to the point where it's worse than useless. I've not upgraded every machine I have, and the overall experience on the machines I have upgraded is pretty poor - so much so that I'm tempted to revert.

I've used emacs for decades. (And EDT/EVE/TPU before that.) For many years I've stayed with emacs 19.34, because it worked. Recently I've switched to emacs 22, because it's newer, maintained, and is what tends to be found on other systems. Again, the experience is staggeringly poor. Not only is it much slower but some of its features are just plain stupid. One of the more idiotic features I came across recently was that it assumes that a file named with a "zone" extension must be a DNS zone. (As a Solaris sysadmin, a zone is likely to be something else.) And if the file doesn't parse as it thinks a DNS zone file should then you are completely unable to even save the file - it's so smugly superior.

The world is full of other examples. Why do we put up with it?

Agile SysAdmin

A while back we had a talk at LOSUG about Agile System Administration. While presenting a particular view, I think Gordon was also trying to get us systems administrators to think more about the theory underlying the work that we do.

Development has formal techniques - Agile, XP, Scrum, pair programming, test-first. And note that these are at a different layer from the actual programming skills required to write the software.

Does Systems Administration have the same sorts of practices? Does it need them? Do the concepts of Agile Development translate into Systems Administration?

Gordon has a blog discussing some of his thoughts on the subject. I encourage those of you interested in the subject to read and contribute. (The home page of the blog is just the welcome; you'll need to look at the Archives and Categories to find the actual blog entries.)

For what it's worth, I think somewhat differently, preferring flexible and lightweight (preferably zero-touch) minimalist administration over mandated standardization and heavyweight processes.

SNMP GUI - Jangle 0.03

A little bit more work (thanks to all for comments and encouragement!) and a new version of Jangle is available.

Some highlights:

• Prototype tree view
• User-defined MIB location (from the File menu)
• Some error handling
• Work done in the background for faster startup and better responsiveness
• The graph has the human-readable name if we can rather than the numeric OID

Enjoy!

Jangle

One of the comments I got yesterday was that my new Java SNMP browser didn't work on Ubuntu. That wasn't entirely a surprise - with such a rough first cut I was astonished that it worked at all, even for me.

But anyway, that was easy enough to fix and I've released a new version that does run on Ubuntu (verified under 8.10) and that ought to me more sane and portable generally. One thing I need to work out is where the MIB files tend to be found on different systems.

I've renamed it to Jangle. It's possible to think of this as

Java Assistant for Networked Graphs that's, Like, Easy

but I wouldn't want you to read too much into it. Really.

Download, and run ./jangle browser

(The new name has more zip, is less generic, and less likely to conflict with other tools.)

A Java SNMP client

I've been looking at SNMP a bit more closely recently. One thing that has struck me is that while there are a number of java based SNMP clients, none of them seemed to be complete, and I couldn't obviously find one that could produce charts easily.

This is easy, right. So a little while later snmpgui was written.



OK, so this is version 0.01. I've been able to retrieve a list of things to monitor (that's the long list of OIDs above). Clearly that needs prettifying a bit - a tree view would be a nice next step. And I can retrieve values and produce pretty charts. That's incoming bytes on my main network interface.

It's a simple proof of concept - but it proves that something can be done pretty easily, and that it works.

SolView 0.46

I've uploaded a new version of SolView. This broadly corresponds to the version I talked about at LOSUG, with one new feature.

I've improved the Jumpstart Profile Builder by adding the ability to import an existing jumpstart profile. The idea is to use this as an initial customization of the set of installed packages that you can then modify further.

In practice, this didn't work out anything like as well as I wanted it to. One of the constraints I place upon the construction of a profile is that the package selection be self consistent: package dependencies must be satisfied. (Indeed, it was the desire to be able to construct such profiles that led to writing the profile builder in the first place.) However, most existing profiles have customizations that lead to unsatisfied package dependencies. Often, fixing up such profiles as they are imported ends up simply undoing all your customizations.

The current implementation is just a first pass, so I could improve it. For example, if it encounters a dependency error on import, it could ask you whether you want to keep the customization (and add or remove other packages as necessary) or ignore the customization. The problem is that this gets you into a horrible rats nest very quickly.

In practice, I find it easier to build a new profile based on an existing one by eye - looking at what I'm trying to add or remove and replicating that in the jumpstart profile builder.

So I'm tempted not to invest too much time on this feature. However, one thing I should be able to do relatively easily is to take the import code and use it to build a profile based on a straight list of packages. For example, this could be used to generate a jumpstart profile that would reproduce an existing installed system.

JKstat 0.27

I pushed out JKstat 0.27 a few days ago. This is just a minor update to 0.26.

I've been playing with the client-server mode a little, and while the basic code hasn't changed it's now a bit cleaner. I added a jkstat.bat and have been running the client on a Vista laptop quite successfully. I also enabled the ability to embed the client inside tomcat in addition to running the basic XML-RPC webserver.

I also fixed a regression spotted when I updated SolView. I had changed the name of the shared library in 0.25, but 0.26 had the old name again. The reason is simple forgetfulness. I develop on an x86 machine, which normally isn't a problem, but if I do any work on the native code then I need to copy across to a sparc machine to do a recompile. I did that just before uploading, and must have forgotten to copy the final version back to my development system. Doh!

Simple Web Services

One of the things I like about XML-RPC is that is really is astonishingly easy to implement. I like to be able to understand the code I write - and that includes the things I reuse from elsewhere. And with XML-RPC, it's even better - it's normally possible to parse the XML that comes back by eye.

Contrast that with the monstrosity that SOAP has evolved into - a huge morass of complexity, massive code size, bloat everywhere, and it's really turned into a right mess. There's been nothing simple about SOAP for a long time now.

The snag with XML-RPC is that there are a couple of rather crippling limitations. In particular, you're stuck with 32-bit integers. I've had to enable vendor extensions in order to use 64-bit longs, and while that's fine for my client code, it makes the JKstat server far less useful for clients using other frameworks and languages.

So I'm stuck in a hole. I'm going to stick with XML-RPC for now, as it will be good enough to test with and is really easy to develop against. (And the way I've implemented the remote access makes it trivial to put in new or replacement access services.)

What's the way forward? I'm not at all keen on building a full web-services stack - that defeats the whole object of the exercise. There has been some discussion recently of exposing the kstat hierarchy via SNMP, but that's clunky and depends on SNMP (great if you use SNMP already, less great if you don't). I've been looking at things like JSON-RPC and RESTful web services as alternatives. The simplest approach may just be to encode everything as Strings and convert back.

Client-server JKstat

One of the things I've wanted to add to JKstat for a while is some sort of client-server capability: the ability to run a server process on a machine and connect to it from a remote client which runs the GUI.

This separation of responsibility can offload the graphical processing associated with displaying the output off the server onto your desktop device. And that desktop device need not be running Solaris. Although I haven't tested it myself, there's no reason why you can't now run the client on - say - Windows.

So, how do you make this work? Having downloaded the latest (0.26) version of JKstat, unpack it, and on the server machine you wish to monitor:

./jkstat server -p 7367

where you can choose a port number, and on the client machine where you want the kstat browser to run

./jkstat remotebrowser -s http://server_name:7367/

so it knows where to look for the server.

The current implementation is very much an experimental proof of concept. There's no access control implemented at present, for example. And the way it operates is bound to change.

At the moment, it's using Apache XML-RPC. I like XML-RPC because it's very simple to use, pretty fast, and lightweight. There are also - in principle - implementations for other languages so you don't have to use Java.

And the Apache XML-RPC implementation can either be standalone (that's the way I'm using it right now) or embedded in a servlet container. The latter would allow you to put pretty well any access control mechanism you like in place.

I'm not particularly fixated about either XML-RPC or this specific implementation, though. This was chosen first because I've used it before and know it's so easy to implement - allowing me to concentrate on the JKstat specific part and seeing how well (or badly) client-server works at all before investing a lot of effort.

In practice, XML-RPC is a pretty good match. It implements Lists (or arrays) and Maps (or hashes) as native constructs. I don't need any more complex data structures. The weakness is that while all I need to pass in those structures are Strings and Long values, the latter requires Vendor extensions, which I've had to turn on, breaking the portability aspect.

Compression going really fast

The Sun coolthreads boxes are great for throughput, but not all that hot at single-threaded performance. One thing that seems to go particularly badly is compression.

Enter pbzip2

# pbzip2 foo.tar 
50187.77u 156.31s 6:39.39 12605.2%

It can fill up all 128 threads and something that would otherwise take over half a day can be done in just over 6 minutes.

Zones, multiple interfaces, and routing

Some things are reasonably obvious in hindsight. This was one of them.

I've been consolidating some old applications into zones on a Solaris server.

Some of them were on physical servers, some were already in zones on other hardware. It turned out that the applications I was consolidating lived on two different subnets, and I didn't really want to go to the trouble of changing IP addresses.

No problem. The T5140 I was using has multiple interfaces, so I connected one of the unused interfaces to the second subnet and gave it an address (the server's primary interface was already in the first subnet I was using).

Then configure up the zones, remembering that you need to choose the correct network device depending on which subnet the zone is in.

And the zones didn't work. Bother. What did I forget? This:

At least one of the network interfaces used by a zone needs to have a default route associated with it.

Specifically, that second network interface needs to have a default route added to it. For the main host, it didn't matter - it will route packets over whichever interface it needs to. But if a zone is only associated with the second network interface, it can't use the default route associated with the first interface.

I add routes explicitly, so just a quick manual

route add net default 10.2.3.254

to add a default route for the second interface did the trick - you can have multiple default routes and Solaris will always use the right one.

To make this permanent, just add multiple lines to the /etc/defaultrouter file.

End of an era

A year ago, the dominant computing platform in the Tribble household was the Sun workstation.

OK, so only one - my W2100z - was anything like modern, with an old Sun Blade 1500 and a couple of antiquated Sun Blade 150s used by the children.

Over the summer, the Sun Blade 150s got retired - one replaced by the Blade 1500, the other by a new laptop.

Then I was fortunate enough to get a decent enough PC free, which has replaced the Sun Blade 1500.

(And don't worry, it's set up to dual boot Windows and OpenSolaris).

So I finally sold the Sun Blade 1500 today, and the house no longer has any Sparc workstations.

Solaris Link Aggregation

Setting up link aggregation in Solaris is pretty simple. First make sure you have a recent version (I'm using update 5 aka 5/08 and update 6 aka 10/08).

Then make sure your switch is configured. For example, on one of my Summit switches where I'm going to aggregate ports 7 and 8:

enable sharing 7 grouping 7 8 lacp

You can see the state of the network interfaces on the host using dladm, for example:

# dladm show-dev
nxge0           link: up        speed: 1000  Mbps       duplex: full
nxge1           link: up        speed: 1000  Mbps       duplex: full
nxge2           link: unknown   speed: 0     Mbps       duplex: unknown
nxge3           link: unknown   speed: 0     Mbps       duplex: unknown

Then on the host (connected to the console - trying to do this over the network is obviously going to be difficult), take down the existing interface:

ifconfig nxge0 down unplumb

Create an aggregate out of nxge0 and nxge1, with index 1 (why normal interfaces start out with index 0 and aggregations start out at 1 is one of those oddities):

dladm create-aggr -P L2 -l passive -d nxge0 -d nxge1 1

And then bring the interface up:

ifconfig aggr1 plumb
ifconfig aggr1 inet 172.18.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 172.18.1.255 up

and then rename /etc/hostname.nxge0 to /etc/hostname.aggr1 so the right thing happens next boot.

Here I've enabled LACP (the '-l passive' flag). I'm not absolutely sure how vital this is, but I think the switch and the host need to be set compatibly.

I had a little play with the policy. In the command above it's set to 'L2'. This didn't work well for me - all the traffic went down one of the links. Same with 'L3'. Setting to to use both L2 and L3 seemed to work better

dladm modify-aggr -P L2,L3 1

and I got traffic using both links, and an aggregate throughput obviously in excess of a single gigabit.

Monitoring the aggregate can again be done using dladm. For example, you can watch the traffic and how much goes down each link with 'dladm show-aggr -s -i 1'.

T5140 trouble

Had a bit of fun and games with a T5140 last week.

This was a new machine (although when I say new, we purchased it a little while ago).

Powered on, and the preinstalled Solaris just panics. Not necessarily a problem, as I reinstall anyway. But I have seen this a few times - the preinstalled system should at least boot.

So I boot using Solaris 10 10/08, and it dies on me:

Fast Data Access MMU Miss

Not good.

What I has to do was install Solaris 10 5/08, update the system firmware, and then install the version of Solaris I wanted.

(Which explains why my other machines are fine - they were first installed a little while ago, so has S10 5/08 on them initially. But it looks as though updating to reasonably current firmware is a really good idea.)

Scaling administration

Commenting on my last SolView post, somebody asked a question I had asked myself:
does it gracefully handle the situation where you have thousands of zfs files systems?
And I don't actually know - because I haven't actually tried it.

The original code got the list of zfs filesystems by calling zfs list (which is now all it does) and then retrieved all the properties for each one - whether you viewed them or not. I soon scrapped that loop, as it was obvious that it doesn't scale. So I think my code is about as efficient as it can be - it's going to scale as well as the underlying tools do.

However, one of the things I've given some thought to - and one of the reasons for writing SolView in the first place - is how to get a handle on systems as they scale up. I'm not talking about managing large numbers of systems (that's an entirely separate problem), I'm talking about looking at a single system where the number of instances of an object may be measured in the tens, hundreds, or thousands.

For example, my T5140s have 128 processor threads. I have systems with 100 virtual network interfaces. Many people have systems with thousands of zfs filesystems. Zones encourage consolidation of multiple application onto a single system (so do other virtualization technologies, but in those other cases you tend to manage the instances independently), so you maybe looking at a system with dozens of zones and thousands of processes running. A thumper has 48 disks, and that's small. Using SMF, a machine typically has a couple of hundred services.

The common thread here is that the number of objects under consideration is larger than you can fit on screen (or in a terminal window, at any rate) in one go. And is thus larger than you can actually see at once. How does your brain cope with reading the output from running df on 10,000 filesystems?

As we move into this brave new world, we're going to need better tools in the areas of sorting, aggregation, and filtering.

A couple of examples from SolView and (originally) JKstat:

I wrote a lookalike of xcpustate for JKstat. That works great on my desktop. But my desktop isn't big enough to show a copy of it running on a T5140, so I wrote an enhanced version (now shipping with SolView) that shows the aggregate statistics for cores and chips, and allows you to hide the threads or cores, which makes the amount of information thrown at your eyeballs at any given time rather more manageable.

Another example is that the original view of SMF services in SolView was just a linear list. I then wrote a tree view, based on the (apparently) hierarchical names of the services. I found that the imposition of structure - even a structure that's mostly artificial - helps the brain focus on the information rather than be overwhelmed by a flat unstructured list. And that structure breaks the services down into chunks that are small enough for the user to handle easily.

So back to the example of huge numbers of ZFS filesystems. So the plan is to show them in the display grouped in the same hierarchy as the filesystems themselves, rather than as a plain list. And to show snapshots as children of their parent filesystem. So everything possible to break things down into more manageable chunks.

This relies on the underlying data being structured. I'm assuming that when someone has 100,000 filesystems that they are structured somehow - whether by department or hashed by name or whatever - rather than being a great unstructured mess. I can't create order out of chaos, but the tools we use should do everything they can to use what order they can find to create a structure that's easy to comprehend.

SolView moves ahead

I've been working on a few new features in SolView, and it's about time for a new release. So that's version 0.45 out of the door.

The major feature this time is a sneak peek of a prototype I've put together for the System Explorer. See the image here for a sample:



You can see the left hand panel containing a tree view of the various bits of the system that SolView has found. Selecting any of them show whatever information I can find - either by running external commands, or by using JKstat to grab statistics.

This is both skeletal and a prototype. But it does try to answer the question: what's in my system, and how do the bits relate to each other? It's the relationships that I'm trying to capture: so I have a disk, but what's it used for, and where's the load on it coming from? And there's clearly a lot more to do in this regard.

MilaX - Wow!

I've been playing around on my laptop today. It's a fairly basic model - with a pretty large screen - that I normally just use for simple connectivity. So the fact that it's running Vista doesn't bother me, as it can launch firefox, VNC, and putty just fine.

I wanted to play around with OpenSolaris on it, which is a bit tricky - it doesn't work right on the metal (I can manually get the wired network to function, but never got the wireless going). So I'm back to running stuff under VirtualBox. Which would be easy if I had a decent amount of memory to play with, but the laptop has 768M and Sun's OpenSolaris distro needs pretty much all of that, so it's not going to work.

Enter Milax. Not only is the download tiny, but it claims to boot graphically in 256M, and CLI in 128M. So I gave it 384M in VirtualBox, and it works just fine!

It's a fabulous little distro. There's no room in that footprint for all the bloat we're used to - no desktop environment, no office suite, no java - but it works, and is really very slick.

In many ways I feel right at home: a standalone window manager and individual applications, all very lightweight, and reminds me of the energy of the 90s before the big desktop environments turned computing into a desolate wasteland.

Refactored JKstat

As I mentioned about a month ago, both JKstat and SolView were in line for some major refactoring.

I've done a bit of a spring clean on JKstat, so there's a new version - 0.25 - which has a lot of the cleanups and shuffling about that I had in mind. The class hierarchy has been restructured, code cleanup continues, and the more complex demos have been moved to SolView. The restructuring also allows the easy construction of a jar file containing just the API, so you don't need to drag in all the bloat associated with the browser, gui components, and demos.

The associated SolView release will follow shortly.

And thanks to Mike Duigou for a bunch of helpful fixes and suggestions!

Would you pass?

Sun have made some free pre-assessment tests available.

Just for fun, I went through the UNIX Essentials one. Would I pass? (Given that I have never had any formal training and have a rather eclectic skills mix it's not a foregone conclusion.)

According to the test, yes. I got a whopping 37/42 which is clearly enough to pass.

I suspect, though, that this says more about the accuracy (and grammatical validity, in one case) of the questions. One of the questions was incapable of being parsed into english, and I had to guess at random. Another one had two possible correct answers depending on factors you weren't told about. Another one had no correct answer on a vanilla Solaris system. There were a couple of questions that I looked at and thought to myself 'you wouldn't ever do it like that'.

(Plus a couple of questions on stuff that I would never use under any circumstances. I had a similar test when I applied for my current job, and my answer to every question mentioning vi was ':q' and use a proper editor.)

I tried the SCSA sample tests - scoring a little better on the part I test, and slightly lower on the part II. But again, there were questions that were simply wrong; some where the correct answer would always be 'look it up in the man page'; some artificially contrived questions; and I'm more than a little concerned about the coverage and subject matter. And on the SCSA tests there are a couple of areas where I haven't done much for a few years now (my OBP and LDAP skills are obviously getting a little rusty).

On OpenSolaris Change

When I noted that Sun's plans for OpenSolaris threatened the Solaris ecosystem, I got a mixed bag of comments.

Some of the comments missed the point, which is that compatibility (across the board) is a key strength, and that producing something that forces what is essentially a new platform on the world will drive away old customers without necessarily attracting new ones.

The key point is compatibility. And while modernization is essential (I'll come back to that later), it is possible to do it compatibly, in an evolutionary manner, rather than doing a rip and replace job.

Evolutionary change allows you to keep existing customers who thus have an easier migration path; makes it easier for new adopters who can tap into the existing skills pool; and allows the improvements to be fed back to older (ie. current, such as Solaris 10) releases which still have a long service life ahead of them.

Replacing the packaging system and installer from scratch is just something you should never do. It's probably cost the Solaris/OpenSolaris ecosystem about 2 years, and we can only hope that we can eventually recover in the way that Firefox did after Netscape's mistake.

Too radical a change?

Attempting to predict the future is difficult, but what I do know about Sun's plans for Solaris and OpenSolaris fills me with concern.

What we seem to be looking at is an OpenSolaris derived replacement for Solaris. Which means a completely replaced packaging system and installer. Being essentially incompatible with what we currently have, this means a fork-lift upgrade: you can't simply go forward as you are before.

Forcing change upon customers is bad. It makes the upgrade a decision point, and customers are then forced to make a choice. So what might customers do? Let's consider some classes of customer:

Solaris-only shops: they have to go from what they have to something different. So given that they have to change, some might take the replacement; I suspect many will choose something different.

Heterogeneous shops: many large shops are heterogeneous, and already support multiple platforms. I see significant resistance to adopting any new platforms, and many shops will simply migrate to one of their existing platforms rather than adopt a new one.

Alien shops: there's going to be problems getting a new platform into a shop that doesn't already use Solaris. Solaris is mature, well tested, has a reasonable number of practitioners available in the job market. An OpenSolaris based platform may be unattractive to such shops: not only would they be unable to bring in expertise for something new, but Sun are advertising it as just the same as Linux, so why would they change to something that isn't different?

So, as I see it, scrapping Solaris and replacing it with a fundamentally different OpenSolaris distribution is going to drive a fraction (possibly quite a large fraction) of the existing Solaris base to other platforms, and I simply can't see any corresponding takeup of new deployments.

Contrast this with the story if you take the existing Solaris and produce a new version (Solaris 11 would be the obvious numbering) that uses the same packaging, installation, deployment, and administration tools as the existing Solaris. In other words, that could be deployed painlessly and seamlessly without any need for additional training or rebuilding new administrative infrastructure, but contains all the advancements that have been made to OpenSolaris in the last 4 years - things such as CIFS client and server, Crossbow, NFS enhancements, and an updated desktop just to name a few. Existing users would simply adopt it as a logical progression; new users would be more attracted because they could concentrate on the technical features and would be able to take advantage of the pool of experience available to deploy it.

The problem is simply one of change. The technical merits of the old and new systems are essentially irrelevant to the discussion. Given how dangerous change is, why is OpenSolaris so insistent on rip and replace rather than improving and enhancing what we already have?

Better documentation style

I don't write as much documentation as I should, and frankly what I do write often isn't done that well. But the OpenSolaris Editorial Cheat Sheet contains a lot of useful advice and hints condensed into a small space. Now, if I could just relearn my writing style my documentation wouldn't look like it was written in such an amateurish fashion!

Solaris Advantages

I make extensive use of Solaris, so thought it would be worth summarizing some of the key advantages that it brings for me. Other people might consider other aspects important, and you could construct similar lists for other platforms.

Compatibility - software that works on one release or for a given patch revision of Solaris is pretty well guaranteed to run subsequently. This is huge, and isn't generally true for other platforms. I've got 20-year old applications running happily day in, day out. By and large, everything just works, and continues to work.

Installation Automation - jumpstart is a huge competitive advantage. You can trivially deploy systems, being able to completely reproduce a configuration, and roll out systems and updates effortlessly.

Lightweight virtualization - Zones, especially sparse root zones, allow you to consolidate large numbers of small systems onto a server, with minimal overhead and without adding to the management overhead normally associated with adding another system to your network. (Note that the real advantage here comes from the use of sparse root zones, which not only guarantee that the zone looks like its parent, but mean that you don't manage the software on the zones at all but just manage the parent host. Whole root zones aren't as lightweight and don't have anything like the same advantages, and branded zones - while a neat trick - don't have any compelling advantages over other virtualization solutions.)

ZFS - for storage on a massive scale, combined with ease of management, and the ability to verify that your data is what you though it was, this is key. To that you can add snapshots (which we use automatically now any time we change something, which makes our backout plans for a change request way simpler than they used to be), and compression (storing text - or xml - files just got a whole lot cheaper), and it's free.

Ease of management - while Sun have generally failed completely to provide advanced management tools, the fact is that you don't need them - the underlying facilities in Solaris are pretty solid and it's trivial to write your own layer of tools on top, and integrate Solaris into a range of other tools. Not only that, but the tools are consistent - while things do evolve, you don't have to completely relearn how to manage the system on a regular and frequent basis.

Cheap - it's free, and not only that but you don't have to pay for a 3rd-party virtualization solution, I/O multipathing, volume manager, or filesystem, as they're all included.

Refactoring solview and jkstat

Originally, JKstat and SolView were completely separate.

The latest released version of SolView comes with JKstat, so you can launch some of the JKstat demos.

I'm looking at much closer ties between the two. I've had a much more in-depth use for JKstat in mind all along, and the way I'm doing it is by adding what I'm calling a "System Explorer" to SolView.

So SolView will have a view of all the interesting components of a system: processors (chips, cores, and threads), memory, disks, filesystems, networks. Anything else if I can think of how to do it. And then will display pretty much everything you can about the selected object. A lot of that information is gleaned from kstats using JKstat.

From that point of view, something like the ZFS ARC demo makes more sense as a sophisticated component inside SolView rather than a standalone JKstat demo application.

So what I'm planning on doing (and this may take a while) is to have a spring clean of the demos in JKstat, removing the bad ones entirely and moving the more complex and involved ones to SolView. And then splitting JKstat into two logically separate parts: the core API (which has no graphical components), and the graphical browser with some basic demos. The two parts of JKstat will still be developed together, although I wouldn't expect that much development once the process is complete, as JKstat will be stable and the higher-level fancy tools will be developed independently under the SolView banner.

How to confuse ImageMagick

I mentioned some huge files generated by ImageMagick.

I worked out what was going wrong. What we do is take a 600dpi original and generate a bunch of images at different resolutions and formats. Looking at the headers:

  Software: Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows

That's odd. Someone has fiddled with the image.

  Image Width: 2943 Image Length: 4126

Hm. Not so bad.

  Resolution: 0.393, 0.393 pixels/cm

Yikes! If my calculations are correct that's 1 dpi.

So when I resize it to 300 dpi I end up trying to create a 882900x1237800 image. 10^12 pixels. No wonder it can't cope.

Moral of the story: never trust your input data.

When to bury the pager

If anyone's been following me on twitter recently you may have noticed a few fraught messages about SANs and pagers.

We have an on-call rota. Being a relatively small department, this actually means that we cover the entire department - so it's possible that I might get a call to sort out a Windows problem, or that one of the Windows guys might get to sort out one of my Sun servers. But it's not usually too stressful.

This last week has been a bit of a nightmare and the problem has been so bad and so apparently intractable that I've simply buried the pager, turned off notification of email and texts on the phone, and relied on someone phoning me if anything new came up. Otherwise I would get woken up several hundred times a night for no good purpose.

Of course, today being the final day of my stint (yay!) I finally work out what's causing it.

What we've been having is the SAN storage on one of our boxes going offline. Erratically, unpredictably, and pretty often. Started last Friday, continuing on and off since.

This isn't the first time. We've seen some isolated panics, and updated drivers. They fix the panic, for sure, but now it just stays broken when it sees a problem. The system vendor, the storage vendor, and the HBA vendor got involved.

We've tried a number of fixes. Replaced the HBA. Made no difference. Put another HBA in a different slot. Made no difference. Tried running one port on each HBA rather than 2 on one. Made no difference. We're seeing problems down all paths to the storage (pretty much equally).

Last night (OK, early this morning) I noticed that the block addresses that were reporting errors weren't entirely random. There were a set of blocks that were being reported again and again. And the errors come in groups, but each group contained one of the common blocks (presumably the other were just random addresses that happened to be being accessed during the error state).

I've had conversations with some users who've been having trouble getting one of their applications to run to completion with all the problems we've had. And they're getting fraught because they have deadlines to meet.

And then I start putting two and two together. Can I find out exactly when they were running their application? OK, so they started last Friday (just about when the problem started). And we know that the system was fine for a while after a reboot, and going back it turns out that either a plain reboot, or a reboot for hardware replacement, kills whatever they're doing, and it may be later in the evening or the next morning before they start work again.

So, it's an absolutely massive coincidence - an almost perfect correlation - that we have problems that kill the entire system for hours an hour after they start their applications up, and the problems finish within seconds of their application completing a task.

So, it looks very much like there's something in their data that's killing either the SAN, the HBA, or the driver. Some random pattern of bits that causes something involved to just freak out. (I don't really thing it's a storage hardware error. It could be, but there are so many layers of abstraction and virtualisation in the way that a regular bad block would get mangled long before it gets to my server.) And it's only the one dataset that's causing grief - we have lots of other applications, and lots of servers, and none of them are seeing significant problems.

So, we can fix the problem - just don't run that thing!

And then I realize that I've seen this before. Now that's on a completely different model of server running a different version of solaris running a different filesystem on different storage. But it's files (different files) but from the same project. Creepy.

Thank heaven for sparse files!

We use ImageMagick to do a lot of image processing. I'm not sure what it's up to, but some processing needs to create temporary working files that can be quite large (in /var/tmp by default, I've moved them with TMPDIR because that filled up).

However, I now see this:

/bin/ls -l /storage/tmp
total 203037932
-rw-------   1 user grp       169845176062560 Sep  4 11:18 magick-XXT0aaXE
-rw-------   1 user grp       222497224416 Sep  4 13:24 magick-XXU0aaXE
-rw-------   1 user grp       11499827272024 Sep  4 13:11 magick-XXbFaiKF
-rw-------   1 user grp       15064771904 Sep  4 13:24 magick-XXcFaiKF
-rw-------   1 user grp       18904557170048 Sep  4 10:51 magick-XXtlaGCE
-rw-------   1 user grp       24764978480 Sep  4 13:24 magick-XXulaGCE

or, in more readable units a few seconds later:

/bin/ls -lhs /storage/tmp
total 203038194
33272257 -rw-------   1 user grp          154T Sep  4 11:18 magick-XXT0aaXE
34295031 -rw-------   1 user grp          207G Sep  4 13:24 magick-XXU0aaXE
29432967 -rw-------   1 user grp           10T Sep  4 13:11 magick-XXbFaiKF
9271301 -rw-------   1 user grp           14G Sep  4 13:24 magick-XXcFaiKF
48382483 -rw-------   1 user grp           17T Sep  4 10:51 magick-XXtlaGCE
48384155 -rw-------   1 user grp           23G Sep  4 13:24 magick-XXulaGCE

Ouch. That's on an internal 146G drive.

What on earth is it doing with a 154 terabyte file?

JKstat meets the ZFS ARC

Recently, Ben Rockwood posted a useful script to display ZFS cache statistics.

Now, all it's doing is grabbing kstats, so it wasn't much of a stretch to put together a new version of JKstat that has a new demo to display the ZFS cache statistics. Try

jkstat arcstat

.
(Requires OpenSolaris, Solaris Nevada, or Solaris 10 8/07 or later to actually have the kstats to display.)

This release of JKstat is a bit rough, as there are a few other things I was working on that aren't neatly finished off yet, but I thought it worth putting out just for the arcstat demo - any comments and suggestions for improvement would be gratefully appreciated!

So, download JKstat now - and here's a little snapshot of the new demo:

Computers - unpredictable creatures

Computers are unpredictable beasts. You would think they would be more deterministic, but reality is otherwise.

I have a server with a tape drive. We've used it for about a year, most days. Then suddenly we start getting errors. At first we thought it was a bad tape, but then multiple tapes started giving us grief. Easy enough, just use a different drive. I finally got around to debugging it last week. Swapped the drives over - still errors. Turned out to be a bad cable. That's a new one - I've not seen a SCSI cable fail like that before. (Usually they fail straight away or when you change something, not after working stably and untouched for the best part of a year.)

Yesterday I set up SNMP on some machines for monitoring purposes. Pointed the monitoring system at them, and a couple of minutes later a couple stop responding. That wasn't part of the plan. So I go to the LOM interface, and they're powered off. Call the datacenter, they haven't done anything. I have seen strange things, but snmp (running unprivileged, I might add) powering a machine off when queried? So I tell them to power themselves back on. One comes up fine, the other boots but no ZFS filesystems or zones. I try format. No SAN disks. And then:

# fcinfo hba-port
No Adapters Found.

Yikes! It had a couple of fiber-channel HBAs in it a few minutes ago.

I still don't know what happened, but some electrical gremlins had gotten into the works. So the machines had obviously shut themselves off due to lack of power. And I'm guessing that the PSUs were capable of supplying just enough power to boot the machine, but not enough to get the HBAs powered up properly. Another new failure mode to go in the book.

The gardening release

I've been developing SolView and JKstat for a while. Over time, code goes stale so I thought it was time for a good cleanup.

Rather than trying to spot all the bad code by eye, I sought a tool that would find unused code, unused imports, and generally find problems automatically. (And I already run javac with the -Xlint:unchecked flag, and use the OpenSolaris jstyle utility.)

After a little looking around, I found PMD and find it very useful. It's done an excellent job of finding poor code. Fortunately, it hasn't found any killer bugs, but has pointed out plenty of cases where I've been sloppy. One bad habit I've got into is unnecessarily declaring class fields rather than local variables, for example. So I recommend it. (I don't regard this as the end of the exercise - I plan to keep looking to see what other static analysis tools can tell me about my code.)

As a result, I've released new versions of SolView and JKstat that have been cleaned up. I haven't done much else to JKstat, although I have enabled the ability for SolView to just show the panel you're primarily interested in (such as just the services, or the general information) which makes it rather lighter weight.

JKstat, SolView, Awards

I've released new versions of JKstat and SolView.

In JKstat, I've added Kstat aggregations. These are used in an enhanced cpustate demo to show the aggregate cpu statistics of a multithreaded core, or a multicore processor. This also needed me to work out how the various cpu kstats were related, so I knew which cpu corresponded to which thread and core of a complex multithreaded/multicore system. (A version of psrinfo naturally fell out of this as something I needed for testing.) There are a couple of new charts - for cpustate and the netload demo.

For SolView, I've added access to the logfiles for SMF services, and also a tree view of the SMF services. The tree is based on the service naming hierarchy, not the dependency tree, and is an experiment to see if that's a useful description of the services (as opposed to a straight list that's a couple of hundred lines long).

These are the entries I've submitted to the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program, and I'm hoping for some success there.

You don't exist, go away!

Oh dear. I try to run ssh and I get:

You don't exist, go away!

Which is sort of correct. I'm changing all the userids (including my own) while logged into the system, so that the shell I was running this from was under the old (now invalid) userid. Still, I was a little surprised at the bluntness of the response.

Making scp go a little quicker

Transferring files with scp isn't the quickest option, but if it's the only one there's a simple way to make it go a little quicker.

scp -c blowfish source.file remote.host:/destination/file.name

Using blowfish rather than the default 3des gave me about an extra 50% or so of throughput.

This was really noticeable on my new T5120s, where I went from under 10M/s to over 13M/s for a single copy. (OK, so it can probably run lots in parallel, but I was just moving large images.)

jingle and jumble

One of the problems with developing in Java is that some relatively common tasks that ought to be simple require writing a lot of boilerplate code, or are otherwise inconvenient.

So, like many others before me, I have a bunch of classes that I use regularly. These are not clever, innovative, or terribly interesting. But they have saved me a lot of typing and repetition over the years.

I named them jingle and jumble. (There were jangle and jungle, which I think had something to do with networking and web services; I've lost those completely.)

The jingle classes help write swing applications. One of the most useful ones is a Frame registry that keeps track of how many windows you have open and allows you to close one or all of them.

In jumble, it's a case of allowing you to get a file into a string (or vice-versa) in one line.

They're used to simplify jkstat and solview.

(I don't really expect others to use them, though. I'm blogging just to note their existence.)

Subtle change on sun.com

Don't know when this was changed, but I've noticed a subtle change on Sun's website recently.

I'm sure that in the main navigation, it had Products first and Downloads second. They seem to have swapped over.

I'm not sure whether this marks a change in direction, with less emphasis on selling stuff and more on giving stuff away, or whether they're tracking visitors and ordering the navigation links by popularity.

Networking vanished

I've had a faulty X2100M2 - it's been claiming for months that it's got a failed fan.

Originally it thought all the fans had failed (although I was somewhat suspicious because the temperatures looked fine). So I replaced them once and that made it happier, but not entirely happy.

So today we tried to replace the faulty fan again. No joy, so we ended up replacing the motherboard. And after fiddling with the cables, we finally persuaded the fault light to go out.

Unfortunately, we were only halfway home. Couldn't get a peep out of the system. Nothing on the serial port, nothing on the SP, couldn't even ping it.

One of the problems was that the replacement motherboard had old firmware, so things like serial port settings were up the creek. I had to play the upgrade game. At least that got me back to sanity, and I could see the system output as it boots.

Whoa there. Couldn't bring the network up. Originally, I had bge0 and bge1; on the new motherboard it decided to call the network interfaces bge2 and bge3. Ok, rename hostname.bge0 and we're back in business, but why on earth was it that hard just to get one of the system fans to work?

SAS vs. SATA

I use Solaris zones a lot.

We've got a number of X2200s, in two variants. Some just run web front ends, and are fitted with SATA drives (once running, the only disk activity is the web server logs); the database back-ends have SAS drives.

OK, so the SAS drives are expected to be a bit quicker - we did get them for that purpose. Based solely on the rotational speed, there's about a factor of 2 difference in performance.

However, if you take zone creation time as a metric, the performance difference is rather larger than a factor of 4. Something else makes the SAS drives fly and the SATA drives crawl.

An upgrade too far

I've been using Live Upgrade on my Solaris servers recently. Normally I would prefer a fresh install, as that gives you more of an opportunity to fix up any mistakes you made, but sometimes you need to preserve the application data or can't afford the downtime.

One word of warning, though: if you're starting with Solaris 8, you can go to Solaris 10 8/07 (update 4), but not to Solaris 10 5/08 (update 5). Even when upgrading from Solaris 9 or 10 you'll need the 7zip patches, but those don't exist (yet, anyway) for Solaris 8.

Sun does quad core Opterons

So Sun are now - finally - pushing quad core Opterons in the X4140, X4240, and X4440.

The X4240 is a new one. I like it. Yes, whereas I complained before, this one does have 16 internal drives.

Living in the Ghetto

Where I work is very much a pure Microsoft shop in terms of user environment - ie. desktops.

(The company makes its money using real Unix servers.)

I'm one of the very few who actually run Solaris on a Sun workstation. And, yes, sometimes I feel like I'm being pushed into a ghetto.

A world where you have to talk to Microsoft Exchange to read your mail, which means Outlook Web Access (which, frankly, is a shockingly poor attempt at being a mail client); where you're sent documents in Office 2007 format that you can't read; where half the company intranet simply doesn't function. Catering to those of living outside the walls simply isn't in Microsoft's world view, it would seem.

So, given the list of features, I'll have to grab the OpenOffice 3 beta and give it a try.

OpenSolaris in VirtualBox

I've been playing around today with VirtualBox, after finding that the latest version claims to run on Solaris 10.

Which is true, but you need to jump through a few hoops first.

First, you need to make sure that libGL.so can be found. I guess this varies a bit depending on whether you're using mesa or have the nividia drivers, but I ended up setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64 to /usr/X11/lib/amd64.

Then you need libXinerama; if you're running an older version of Solaris (my test machine was running S10U3 == 11/06) then applying patch 125726-02 will do the trick.

Then if you're running 64-bit you'll need a copy of libdlpi. I just snarfed a copy off one of my test opensolaris boxes (actually indiana preview 2 - I have seen comments that the one from the official OpenSolaris release won't work as it's too new).

(Yes, I realize there might be a bit of a chicken and egg situation there!)

Then I tried booting the indiana preview 1. Which worked just great. No network, but I expected that. The only glitch I had was the key to escape from the guest - which is set to Right Ctrl by default, which I discovered I don't have. I reset that to some other key that I do have and don't use for anything else.

Having learnt from that, I had a go at the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release having found a CD that I had brought back from CommunityOne, and that worked fine (and picked up the network).

Et tu, Brute?

So Jim's posted some photos of the OpenSolaris Developer Summit.

It was great to meet so many people in person. We had some good talks, lots of discussions (not all of which actually led to results, but you can't have everything). One of the things that is clear is that open communication is vital, and we definitely had some of that.

We're on the way to building a stronger community, and there was some additional encouragement organised for us. Go Team International!

Next up, Community One.