There is also apparently questionable telemarketing behaviour associated with the pro-Q side. And jra links to another no-on-Q blog, which describes a reaction to the “real pictures” mailing similar to my own. (I’m a little puzzled why none of these blogs are popping up on Google yet.)

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The other day, I noted some interesting politics in Redwood City/San Mateo County. The Economist isn’t covering this race, but is covering the U. S. Senate race in Oklahoma, and that the total spending there has been 3.8 M$. So the Poizner–Ruskin state assembly race in California and a Senate race in Oklahoma match up [...]

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Although the major political news stories surround the U. S. Presidential Election, we’re having an exciting time in Redwood City, with the Poizner–Ruskin race for Assembly and the contest over Measure Q, which would approve the proposed Marina Shores Village along San Francisco Bay. Not being a citizen, I can’t vote. Moreover, I’m probably hopelessly [...]

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(I’ve been fixing little smf(5) bugs, as well as revising our documentation, presentations and–most importantly–more block diagrams for this blog. But I bumped into an annoyance and thought I should share.) As an young old-school Unix developer, I tend to live in terminal windows. One of my favourite commands is cal(1), which has a great [...]

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I mentioned yesterday that you can manipulate services if you have the appropriate authorizations, without needing to possess any privileges. For instance, my current shell has the following privileges and authorizations: $ ppriv $$ 117292: bash flags = E: basic I: basic P: basic L: all $ auths solaris.device.cdrw,solaris.profmgr.read,solaris.jobs.users,solaris.mail.mailq And if we try to manipulate [...]

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Let’s consider how applications are traditionally started: we execute (or the system executes) a command, such as fooadm(1M), which in turn calls fork(2), does some detachment work, and then calls exec(2) to run food(1M) (which is what we wanted). A schematic of this sequence would look like For long-running, always-needed applications (which we call services), [...]

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The Register is displaying with a Sun Blue theme today.

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you can choose to know less. For instance, if you need to know what application model your program runs under, then you have to know how to start or restart or stop your application. The common example is that, if you run a process under inetd(1M), then telling inetd(1M) to take notice of your new [...]

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One interesting aspect of smf(5) is that we have pulled apart many of the assumed interrelationships between system services, and made them explicit. Doing this makes building availability and failure models much easier, but it also lets us see one projection of Solaris’s shambling shape. (There’s another interesting technique for dynamic discovery of relationships via [...]

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We had our moment on sun.com last week, which was pretty gratifying: my first slides on doing this project are from June 2001, and I’m not certain how long before that—1997? 1998?—we started sketching out aspects of the problem. smf(5), which we developed under the codename “Greenline”, is now rolling out pretty well inside Sun, [...]

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