@schahnsmf(5) ended up in two stories on slashdot today. In “Torvalds on Opening Solaris”, elmegil observed I’m rather amused to see Sun be the first to implement a replacement for the old init and have it done. I can’t say I know who thought it up first, but Solaris 10 SMF is the first working [...]
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(I know I need to wrap up the cal(1) contest. I also need to finish about three smf(5) blog entries. I am also mostly keeping up with the forum/list/newsgroup traffic on smf(5). I also have a few more bugfixes to get into Solaris 10 first. But a small dispatch seems necessary.) One of the neat [...]
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The Marina Shores Village site has been removed. I haven’t done enough math yet to even speculate, so I’ll merely point it out.
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Darren has a neat example of using zenity(1) and smf(5) to make an “on-off” switch for his laptop’s network connection. The result: where “Up” brings up network/physical and “Down” shuts it down—convenient for Solaris laptop users. zenity, by Glynn Foster, makes writing little panels like this so easy I suspect there might be a naescent [...]
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I was a bit surprised by how little discussion of smf(5) I’d found (or how little emotional discussion, perhaps). comp.unix.solaris regulars figured things out moments after the images were posted to the Download Center, while the discussion of Predictive Self-Healing forum at BigAdmin focused on futures and further integration with management software. But it turns [...]
I mentioned that I’d converted a few of the F/OSS software packages that we use on our home system. Of course, the point of smf(5) isn’t to force you to rewrite all of your init.d scripts—it’s to force you to encourage your vendor to do so. (Wait, that’s not right, either.) I’ll come back to [...]
The semi-official election results for San Mateo Country have been posted. For the two elections we were watching at blueslugs.com: In the county, Ira Ruskin (D) [37,877] defeated Steve Poizner (R) [29,833]. This margin is substantially narrower than other state or national elections in San Mateo County. These results need to be added with the [...]
Our electrical power at home has been sagging occassionally. It tripped yesterday for a couple of seconds: enough for everything without batteries or some capacitance to reset. (So clocks set yesterday, and again today.) Our main server went as well, and I noticed one or two services—running under very early Solaris 10—didn’t come back up [...]
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We’ve posted an smf(5) quickstart guide and a preliminary service developer introduction (written by Liane), and are listening in the Predictive Self-Healing forum. If you like, comment to let me know when the images hit the Download Center—they’ll most likely say “b69″ somewhere in the filenames.
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Google (and the other search engines, I’m sure) are amusingly tenacious: if you search for “solaris” and the smf(5) command of your choice, you’ll start to find early content deep within the sun.com web tree as well as other Solaris and Unix sites. (These keywords will also deliver information about holiday resorts, although I can’t [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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), [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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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I had built an early version of libxosd for my Solaris SPARC systems a year or two ago, since it provides a very tidy way to have a ubiquitous onscreen clock with a wide variety of window managers. libxosd went, when I was distracted, through a substantial rewrite, culminating in a 2.2.x series release. And [...]
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August was hectic. smf(5) required care and feeding, as did our newborn Nathaniel. I took a strange kind of quasi-paternity leave, by remaining home Tuesdays and Thursdays. (Don’t do this—you’re left with very few long concentration blocks on the workdays.) I also took Ben to Muskoka to celebrate a family history centennial, and we all [...]
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Our trip to Chicago was wonderful and on Tuesday we rushed to the airport trying not to blame each other in front of the kids for why we were late. It turned out that we were able to meet the 45 minute baggage deadline for our flight, although we both promised to do things differently [...]
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Every so often we have a summer so bad all we can do is try to ride it out until things start to change. This has been one of those summers. In addition to the death of my father, three days before the birth of our son, we have also had what we thought were [...]
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