News

Restricting Service Administration in the Solaris 10 Operating System by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-09-21 12:54

Another interesting BluePrints article describes some more features of Solaris 10. This one illustrates how the administrator can configure the Service Management Facility (SMF) to require specific authorisations for certain types of operations.

New Sun x86 Opteron Servers by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-09-21 12:54

Sun have expanded their x64 server family with Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers. They are powered by dual-core or single-core AMD Opteron processors, and can run Solaris OS, Linux, and Windows

OpenSolaris Released by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-09-21 12:54

OpenSolaris was finally released on June 14, 2005.

Creating Self-Balancing Solutions with Solaris Containers by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-09-21 10:59

Solaris Zones is BSD Jails on steroids. Solaris Resource Management gives fine control over how the system resources are used by its services. Solaris Containers is Zones + SRM and is a powerful way to partition and balance services on a Solaris 10 system. I found this Sun BluePrints article offered a good overview of how this can be done.

UberJS: A More Flexible Solaris JumpStart System by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-09-21 10:59

Based on a Redhat Kickstart style of install - that is, booting off CD, answering a few prompts, and fetching all packages off the network - UberJS is an interesting variation of the Solaris Kickstart which may be useful in some shops but not all.

FireEngine - super charged networking architecture for Solaris by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-09-21 10:59

Sun aren't standing still with network performance, they are re-designing the Solaris TCP/IP architecture with a new, optimised network stack they are calling FireEngine.

A Comparison of Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD Kernels by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-10-20 15:01

Max Bruning compares Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD Kernels over at OpenSolaris, focussing on scheduling, memory management, and file system architecture.

Security Forensics Using DTrace by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-10-25 19:26

Sys Admin Magazine has a great article on using Solaris 10's DTrace as a security forensics tool for analyzing suspicious files and processes.

Sun to update Solaris 10 by year end by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-10-25 21:37

Sun plans to release its first Solaris 10 update by the end of the year, featuring a new start-up process and smart software update features. However, the eagerly-awaited ZFS and Janus technologies will have to wait until next year, at least.

Jeff Bonwick explains RAID-Z by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-11-24 16:16

RAID-Z is an exciting new chapter in the story of RAID storage. ZFS makes use of it, and now that ZFS has been released, Jeff Bonwick explains what RAID-Z is all about.

Building Trac on Solaris walk-thru by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-12-02 14:21

I have written an article on how to build all the dependencies for Trac on Solaris 10. Some of the dependencies do not build out-of-the-box, and some magic is required. This is what worked for me, anyway.

Sun Cluster is free! by Chris Miles — last modified 2005-12-03 14:53

Sun has been going mad lately (in a good way!) and releasing a lot of its products for free. Solaris 10, obviously, and just recently Sun Studio 11, Java Enterprise System and N1 Software were announced as being free. And as part of all that, a move which surprised many, is the release of Sun Cluster 3 at no cost as well. This is great news for those looking for high quality, enterprise grade, high-availability solutions. Ben Rockwood's discussion of the announcement is worth a read to understand what this means.

Case study - Consolidating the Sun store onto SunFire T2000 servers by Zac Stevens — last modified 2005-12-14 14:26

Sun has published a Blueprint describing their efforts to consolidate their online store onto the SunFire T2000 platform.