Mike’s World

I came so close to having a day off work today. I had signed up to take a beta Solaris 10 exam, about an hour before going to the exam, it turned out that we had backup problems with snapshots again. I need to sit down and find a way to make this process more stable. Are we doing something that is so far out there? am I pushing the technology to hard? Did they have these types of problems with HDS shadow? Did I not test enough? I need to watch it.

So, I got to the exam center, took the test, and learned some good stuff. Got home, played with snapshots a bit and watched TV. nothing to exciting, which is what I wanted today.

Well, I decided to take today off of work. A friend of mine asked me to stop over and talk to his shop about some of the stuff I have done with veritas snapshots, so I thought that was a good excuse to take the day off of work. I slipped in quite a bit, headed down to his shop and talked for a bit, then went to the Italian pie shop for lunch. I had not been to that place for years, it was nice. unfortunately it was not Friday, so they did not have the pizza I liked the most which was deep dish pepperoni and sausage.

After getting back, I cleaned out my car a bit, killed some time and went off to my fathers for dinner. overall a very uneventful day.

Today a Sun rep by the title of an Operating System ambassador came in today during lunch. It was very cool, she was not a sales person, but more technical. She works directly with the Solaris engineering teams, and presents to end customers. She spent about 3 hours going over the features of Solaris 10, which the highlights are:
1. Security
2. Dtrace
3. Zones
4. ZFS.

It was a good presentation, and I hope it sparked Solaris 10 in our team.

Well, today at work we had taken a break to go off to VERITAS for a veritas users group meeting, me and two co-workers went. We got a presentation on the entire line of veritas products, and after we had discussions on netbackup. On the way out, I saw someone had the license plate “UNIX SA”. It was very interesting, being parked right next to my SU ROOT plate. The weather ended up being a very nice 48 degrees, which is very good for feb. in Minnesota.

Early this morning I finished downloading Solaris 10. I now have it installed on a lab server at work, and on my Ultra 60 here at home. At work most of the day was spent with fires, so I did not get much of a chance to play with it. At home after work I spent most of my time getting apps compiled.

So far, I have found the SunLogo desktop backdrop is not in CDE, and I can not get the SolarisLogo one working. I managed to get xchat, pan and gaim compiled, as well as sudo and top. I did need to compile a new gettext, because the one with solaris did not work for some reason.

Early morning tomorrow, so off to bed.

Well, today I finished off the LOTR series, by watching the extras. I do think I need to re-watch the extras in FOTR, because as I watched the other DVDs, I discovered some other goodies. It is kind of touching to see how much this set of movies affected the cast and crew of the movies, as they said good bye to each other and parted ways.

Today I had off work, so I spent the time doing things like paying bills, washing clothes, cleaning the car, etc. I watched the meet the fookers movie, and it was not as good as the first movie. Kind of disappointing.

Solaris 10 FCS has been released, so I am going to download it and get it loaded on my Ultra 60 tonight. I will also get a jumpstart image built for work so I can get it on my work sunblade tomorrow or the next day. I look forward to seeing the final goodies they packed in.

A cool tutotial on how to build a VCS cluster, from volume creation to HA failover
http://www.pzi.net/VCS-HOWTO

I will be the first to admit that I am a Solaris/Sun bigot. They make (somewhat) solid hardware, and a great, stable, fast operating system. I will also mention that IBM makes rock solid RISC hardware, which is why I deduct points for Sun hardware.

Anyways, today I ran across This article defending Solaris in response to this article. The second article is from HP’s Linux Vice-President, and he just bashes Sun all over the place, regarding Sun’s open source strategy, and Sun’s X86 strategy. The first article just tears apart the HP VPs bashing, and I think it was a very good read for the folks that still like Sun, I just had to share it.

BTW, about 5 days and counting until we have Solaris 10 FCS!

Most of today was playing with veritas snapshots and playing with DNS. This morning I started work on a script to clean up and rebuild snapshots after a HDS shadow copy. When the shadow copy is done, snapshot from data from one set of disks is copied on to another, and the original set of snapshot data is lost. Because of this, a clean and rebuild process is needed.

I got about half done with the above, when I was pulled in to a DNS meeting. it turns out that the conversion of the NT domain to an active directory domain failed over the weekend, and DNS is the problem. We had some evil entries in DNS that caused a dynamic update to fail, and we have a stub zone that is not behaving. More work on this problem tomorrow.

At work I get to be involved in yet another database environment we are building up. This one is going to be a Sun E2900 oracle server and a Sun V1280 app server. They also require about 6TB of disk. Fun! No top of that, I get to refresh an environment that has been around for years. Going to start working on that on Thursday. Looks like I might be able to give my friends at datalink some business.