Ontic Oren

CONGRATULATIONS!

A huge group of people have pulled off the impossible. They have managed to release a developer preview of Open Solaris in October. 8:32PM PST 10/31 shall go down in history!

I immediately downloaded and ran the image in VMware Fusion 1.1RC1 on my 24″ Santa Rosa iMac. Booted fast, and I was running. LIVE CD! Hooray! Ran the installer, enjoyed myself a trivial process, and waited ~20 min for it to finish.

Sadly, there is some weird weird bug that I’ve run into before that all the recent solaris builds, including Opensolaris exhibit - they hang/take forever to boot. Waited ~5 min and it finally started it’s thing. Sure enough, it’s got a nice bash shell, it’s snappy, firefox works, the package system seems to have packages, and it’s even running ZFS by default! I was even going to drop the output from “zfs list” here, but realized without VMware tools there’s no easy way to copy/paste between opensolaris and OSX, and I’m not in the mood to type it all in, nor FTP/SCP it around. So trust me, or just run it yourself!

Took the mandatory screen shot too:

Upgraded to Leopard last night. (BTW, drove by the Palo Alto Apple store on the way home, where there was a ~100 person line @ 6 waiting for the store to reopen. For an OS. Apple, please rub some juju on me too). As you can imagine, there are thousands of people pontificating all over the web. I haven’t seen anyone cover the one change that means the world to me: Spotlight and mail.Previously, searching for mail was tedious. My standard M.O. involves remembering that Steve sent me an email with a presentation in it, but not really remembering anything else. It used to be, I created a “smart folder” for email from steve, then searched that folder for emails to me or that contained a presentation. Not exactly useful.Now, just type: “from:steve to:oren odp” (yeah, I use neooffice/staroffice) and I’ve got my results. This is the way google desktop, MSN desktop, and even ancient Lookout search all worked. It’s been the ONE thing I’ve really missed in my switch to a mac, and now it’s here! I’m such a loser - but this made the $120 upgrade totally worth it. Doesn’t hurt that spotlight is now blazing fast too.

Upgraded to Leopard last night.  (BTW, drove by the Palo Alto Apple store on the way home, where there was a ~100 person line @ 6 waiting for the store to reopen.  For an OS.  Apple, please rub some juju on me too).  As you can imagine, there are thousands of people pontificating all over the web.  I haven’t seen anyone cover the one change that means the world to me:  Spotlight and mail.Previously, searching for mail was tedious.  My standard M.O. involves remembering that Steve sent me an email with a presentation in it, but not really remembering anything else.  It used to be, I created a “smart folder” for email from steve, then searched that folder for emails to me or that contained a presentation.  Not exactly useful.Now, just type: “from:steve to:oren odp” (yeah, I use neooffice/staroffice) and I’ve got my results.  This is the way google desktop, MSN desktop, and even ancient Lookout search all worked.  It’s been the ONE thing I’ve really missed in my switch to a mac, and now it’s here!  I’m such a loser - but this made the $120 upgrade totally worth it.  Doesn’t hurt that spotlight is now blazing fast too.   

I came up with a ridiculous title and comment for a previous post, but couldn’t bring myself to use it. I can’t bring myself to delete it either. So here it is. Yes, I’m a loser.

ameliorating erudition via the disambiguation of conjoined concepts

please excuse the adoxography by a clear logastellus

(thanks to this long word dictionary)

Recently decided to try out VMWare ESX.

• ESX offers two management interfaces, a desktop client or a browser interface. Neither support the Mac.
• It looks like you must use the “Virtual Infrastructure Client”, a windows app, to get started using ESX
• Took me a little bit to figure out how to get ESX running inside Fusion. Virtualization.info had some good pointers. Watch out if you’re copying from the web for “smart quotes”. Curly quotes will crash VMware right quick

The results: a really silly screenshot. What, you may be asking, is that? It would be Joomla appliance from rPath running on ESX running on Fusion, with the VI client running on Windows running on Fusion. It worked amazingly well, though joomla booting was a bit slow - about 30 min.In case you’re wondering, the key lines to add/edit in the vmx file are:

scsi0.VirtualDev = "lsilogic"ethernet0.virtualdev = "e1000"monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUEmonitor_control.vt32 = TRUE

I totally need to break down at night and try this. Not that I ever carry a pencil. Or would want to rip out the speaker wire from my car. Maybe I’ll just make sure to carry a flashlight with me instead.

Be careful of the windows you look through - sometimes you won’t be happy with what you see. Sun has posted review widgets on our site for a few months now. In keeping with our blog philosophy and our open source culture, it makes sense to solicit feedback direct from the source. One of the keystones of a review is a fair basis of understanding - the reviewer knows and understands what it is they are reviewing. So what do you do when that breaks down?One of my products, Sun Connection has had a spate of bad reviews recently. As soon as they came up, we looked closely at each one. And each one has the same problem - it’s not for the product that we have listed! To a tee, every review was really feedback on a feature in Solaris that provides single system patch updates, confusingly called Sun Update Connection (vs this product - Sun Connection). Sun Connection is an enterprise patch management tool that works across Linux, zLinux and Solaris systems. Sun Update Connection is a simple interface into downloading patches from Sun for a single machine.Choice reviews inlcluded such pointed feedback as:

• Extremely buggie product. It hangs very often and sometimes is very difficult to put the tool working again.
• I will never use Sun again. I have been migrating my business and my customers from Solaris to Linux. This is absurd. No more patch clusters. Register for this. Register for that. Sun used to be a great company. No more. I can’t get security updates without remembering my username for this, my username for that. Ubuntu and Debian, here we come!
• While the GUI is nice in theory, I hate it. It gives no feedback onwhat it is doing and which machine it is doing it on. I wouldmuch rather have a CLI based method that give proper feedback and syslogging. Plus updatemanager is unreliable
• Unusable. Would much rather download clustered patches, which doesn’t seem to be an option anymore

Ouch. Frankly though, fair. All these comments point out very real deficiencies in the built in patch management tools with Solaris. They also point out frustration with our patch policy. What they don’t point out is any feedback on the product the reviews show up on - Sun Connection, our enterprise patch management tool. Clearly, this is our (SMI’s) fault. We haven’t done a good enough job naming and describing our products, we haven’t communicated out patch policy well, and we apparently haven’t given customers enough options on how to use the system. We’re working aggressively on addressing all of these - with Project Indiana, launching new products and restructuring the web site.In the meantime, we’ve taken the reviews down off our product page. I want to apologize - this is a failing of my team that we’ve needed to do this, and we’re working overtime to relaunch our pages with a clearer delineation on what exactly our products are. The point of the reviews is to help spark the conversation, and keep it open even among the disenfranchised. Reviews will return soon (before the end of the calendar year). In the meantime, please take advantage of the comments, and let’s have a discussion on the issues and merits of our products! We know we’re not perfect, and we do want to make it better!