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I’m stepping down and away from Triton and SmartOS development. I can confirm that MNX (the former owner of Triton) has been acquired by Parler . Yes, you read that right. The deal was finalized in November 2024. Employees weren’t much notice. Acquihire offers went out on 11/18, due on 11/29. They came in late enough that most people didn’t see it until the next day and with most…
Note: This was originally published to http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/date/20040925 by Jeff Bonwick. It came up for discussion recently but since Oracle no longer has any published copies, it was retrieved from The Wayback Machine and reposted here. Saturday Sep 25, 2004 One gentle reader offered this feedback on our recent ZFS article : 64 bits would have been plenty … but then you…
I started playing guitar in August 2020 during the pandemic to give myself something to do. This is kind of a made up excuse, because between working from home and having three kids, I rarely go out anyway. Pandemic life didn’t change much for me, but I got interested and went for it. Here’s what I learned as a guitar noob that I think might be helpful for other people wanting to get…
For the past ten years I’ve been using Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker service to get IPv6 transit at home long before it was available from my ISP (Cox Communications). Today, I bit the bullet and switched to native IPv6 from my ISP. While Hurricane Electric has has been fantastic, it’s not a perfect solution for most residential users. Being a tunnel you’re force to…
I recently migrated my Unifi controller from a bhyve instance in Triton to an LXC container in a Raspberry Pi. I won’t go into all the reasons why here , but suffice it to say that I had made some choices about my existing network that, while they made sense at the time, didn’t really jell with the way Unifi is intended to operate. I’ve been running a controller myself for over a…
The CDDL is not incompatible with the GPL. Anybody who says otherwise has an agenda. I’ve heard all the arguments. They’re all bullshit and FUD. I, of course, am not a lawyer. But I can read. This is written primarily to discuss the situation with the Linux kernel and ZFS. First, let’s review. The Linux kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPL). The…
Last week I presented on Triton at LOPSA LA and UUASC . I’ve got video this time! And slides, though most of the talk was live demos, so the slides leave a bit to be desired.
I’ve previously written about creating SSL certificates . Times have changed, and ECC is the way of the future. Today I’m going to revisit that post with creating ECDSA SSL certificates as well as how to get your certificate signed by Let’s Encrypt. Generating an ECDSA Key Since this information doesn’t seem to be readily available many places, I’m putting it here.…
I have a different relationship with Star Wars than most people. Star Wars was origionally released in theaters fourty-seven days after I was born. The Empire Strikes Back was the first movie I saw in a cinema. I stood on the seat, transfixed on the screen from the crawl to the credits. Return of the Jedi was the first movie I remember seeing in theaters. I’ve seen A New Hope something on…
Last week I presented on illumos at LOPSA San Diego .
Update: As of 20150917T235937Z full support for IPv6 has been added to vmadm with the added ips and gateways parameters. If you’re using SmartDataCenter, these parameters won’t (yet) be added automatically, so the following may be useful to you. But if you’re using SmartOS, see the updated SmartOS IPv6 configuration wiki page. There have been a lot of requests for IPv6 support in…
Update: For CFEngine 3.6.2. CFEngine recently released version 3.6, which makes deploying and using cfengine easier than ever before. The greatest improvement in 3.6, in my opinion, is by far the autorun feature. I’m going to demonstrate how to get a policy server set up with autorun properly configured. Installing CFEngine 3.6.2 The first step is to install the cfengine package, which…
This isn’t a leak. I don’t have any direct knowledge. But I have been around the block a few times. It’s now widely known that the NSA is breaking most encryption on the Internet . What’s not known is how. We also know that the Flame malware was signed by a rogue Microsoft certificate . That rogue Microsft certificate was hashed with MD5, which is what allowed it to be…
Although GNU coreutils includes a timeout command, sometimes that’s not available. There are a lot of ham fisted approaches by very intelligent people. The “right” way to do this is with the ALRM signal. That’s what it’s for. So rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s a correctly working timeout function. This works in at least bash and zsh . cleanup () { [[ -z…
Republished from WikiLeaks . Friday July 12, 15:00 UTC Edward Joseph Snowden delivered a statement to human rights organizations and individuals at Sheremetyevo airport at 5pm Moscow time today, Friday 12th July. The meeting lasted 45 minutes. The human rights organizations included Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and were given the opportunity afterwards to ask Mr Snowden questions.…
I’m setting up Raspberry Pi’s using the Edimax EW-7811Us wifi module available on Amazon for a mere $11. Following the Debian WiFi wiki page initially didn’t work. The EW-7811Us uses an RTL8188CUS chipset which requires the rtl8192 kernel driver. There’s no firmware-realtek package on Raspbian, and the best answer I found was to download some dude’s hacked kernel…
I’ve been working a lot with CFEngine newbies. CFEngine has been described as flour, eggs, milk and butter. All the ingredients needed to make a cake. Getting the new CFEngine user to recognize, then become excited about the possibilities that CFEngine provides they are now faced with the question of “What next?” Indeed, anybody can throw some flour, eggs, milk and butter into a…
System administration is not something that monkeys can do. While places like ITT Tech or Coleman University do teach the basics of using a computer they don’t teach how to be a truly great system administrator. Learn why things work on a starship In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn during the first encounter between Kirk and Kahn, Kahn has crippled the Enterprise and is demanding…
I’ve been running Cacti at home to keep track of a number of things. It’s wonderful, and I highly recommend it if you understand the phrase “turn on SNMP”. But ever since upgrading to Solaris 11 Express, Cacti graph rendering has been extremely slow. The PHP renders fine, but the graphs would take several seconds per graph and with some pages having upwards of 20 graphs it…
I loved it. From start to finish I loved it. The visuals were spectacular. Light cycles and other vehicles were exciting and very fun. The mythos fits nicely with the established Tron mythos. It was of course not exactly the same feel as Tron. It was different where it needed to be. Where Tron tried to give as much homage to computer vernacular of the day, Tron: Legacy does very little of that,…
In celebration of the remaining twelve /8’s in the IPv4 global address pool. cc-by --> No video playback capabilities detected. Why not try to download the file instead? Special thanks to A-ron .
I am a sage. -->
I read an article this morning about falsehoods programmers believe about names (and probably the rest of you too). Reminds me of this:
When I set up my OpenSolaris server, in order to save on money I had to skimp a little on the disks. I’m only at about 33% capacity right now, but once I pass the 50% mark it will be a good idea to start shopping around for larger disks. By then nice cheap 2TB or 3TB drives should be available. But there’s no reason I can’t get prepared now! The process for growing a zpool is…
The Beginning of a Nightmare One week ago my hard disk failed in my laptop, which is my primary computer. It wasn’t a big deal to me at the time because I knew it was going to fail. I had noticed the signs that I know full well indicate imminent disk failure. But without a full failure I wouldn’t be able to get it warranty repaired. So I waited. Until one week ago. Apple didn’t…
Recently in discussing Flash on the iPad, I was told to admit that I’m an Apple fanboy. I hate to disappoint you but to “admit” such a thing would be lying. If anything I’m a UNIX fanboy. I’m not a fan of Apple’s draconian App Store policies or many of their PR policies. I use a Mac laptop because it’s the only decent UNIX laptop. Not because it’s an…
The Drake Equation notwithstanding, the folks over at SETI have realized it’s all a big waste of time . Let’s assume for the moment that extra terrestrial intelligent life exists. The is Earth over 10 billion of years old and the universe billions of years older still. We’ve been broadcasting for just under 100 years , or roughly 1/100,000,000th of the earth’s existence.…
I’ve been working on a project recently where I want to redirect users logging into Apache to that user’s personal directory. There is a lot of incorrect information out there . Most sites recommend something close to the following: (NOTE: This is wrong ) RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REMOTE_USER} uid=([^,]+), RewriteRule ^/users/$ /users/%1 There’s a few problems with this. The…
Until recently I’ve been using VMware Fusion for my testing needs. With the release of Snow Leopard , Fusion no longer cut it. It was buggy on SL, and lacked 64-bit capability. Since I’ve set my system to boot 64-bit by default Fusion didn’t work at all. I’ve also grown quite dissatisfied with VMware ESX. Enter VirtualBox . VirtualBox is free (no more $70 upgrades!) and has…
I ran across an article on Life Hacker about an updated GTD workflow with a link to flickr but the picture has been deleted. I spent some time looking around for it, and finally found it. For others who are looking, here it is.
Both Safari and Firefox now support HTML 5 <video> tags. This is a test. Your browser does not support the video element. You should upgrade. Safari works like a charm, even on my iPhone, and OmniWeb works for free. But this still doesn’t seem to work in Firefox, apparently it only supports Ogg . They did a good thing, and then screwed it up. It appears that, for now at least, you’ll…
The most glorious thing happened to the worst software ever. As you probably know, I’ve been on the hunt for some way to export my Exchange calendar to iCal. Google yields little . Here are the options: Use Entourage Use Entourage sync to iCal Use Groupcal sync to iCal Use Sync’Em sync to iCal Well, Entourage just sucks. That’s all I’ll say about that. As for the others,…
I like my new iPhone quite a lot. The best new feature is speed. Man that thing is fast . I finally moved Rhonda’s account over to my old phone so now she’s using my old 16GB iPhone with OS 3.0. But now I’ve got an extra 8GB iPhone that I’m not entirely sure what to do with. Sell it on eBay? or Craigslist? Give it away? It’s a gift with bite, because it comes with a…
I’m a little late to the whole “tea party” thing, because I only figured out what they are today. The tea parties are at best, an empty gesture. You don’t have tea to throw into the ocean. If you’re really pissed about the financial crisis then the analog to that would be throwing your money into the ocean. Except that doesn’t make very much sense either. If you…
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo .
Approximately three hours ago Barack Obama became America’s 44th president. Perhaps I never paid attention, but it seems to me like today is a much more joyous occasion than any of the presidential inaugurations that I can remember (for the record, it’s 3). But the thing that I find the most interesting is the technology used by the new administration. The inauguration has used…
My faith in the ability of society to continue to exist is at an all time low. First there’s the financial crisis . Then there’s Worldbank’s most sensitive data is apparently free for the taking . And to top it all off, your government is spying on you because they think it’s funny .
Did the economy turn into a giant pile of steaming dung just yesterday, or is this the first I’ve heard of it? Government Seizes Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Lehman Group Files for Bankruptcy Merrill Lynch Is Sold to Bank of America Washington Mutual Credit Rating Is Cut to Junk by S&P Financial Russian Roulette “When do we run down to the bank in a mob like in ‘It’s a Wonderful…
There are several articles about people who want a portable music player but adamantly do not want an iPod. I find this a little bit interesting, having been one of those people myself. There are essentially two reasons behind this. 1) preference for a format not supported on the iPod and 2) Apple resentment. I’ll set aside 3) DRM because if you have DRM’d music that creates a…
The horse’s mouth: In Roman times the employees of Fannie Mae would be decimated, i.e., they would draw lots and 90 percent of them would beat the unlucky 10 percent to death with clubs. What would be a modern equivalent? At the very least taxpayers should have the satisfaction of seeing the highest paid 100 Fannie Mae employees fired with two weeks of severance pay (it can’t be that hard to…
Everyone seems to be talking about how much Palm is sucking these days. Truth is they’ve sucked for quite a while, but so did pretty much everyone else. Now Palm’s had straight losses for four quarters in a row. Hmm…I seem to recall another handset that came out a year ago or something like that…but I can’t quite seem to put my finger on it. Oh well, maybe it will…
I don’t generally enjoy beating dead horses. But sometimes dead horses are bad and must be punished. A lot of people have asked, and apparently nobody I associate with reads the news. No, I’m not getting a new iPhone. Why? Because for me it’s not worth it. There’s a lot of confusion between the hardware iPhone 3G and the iPhone OS X 2.0 software. Let’s discuss each of…
I do realize that it’s been well over a month since my last post. Going on two months now. April has completely fallen off of the calendar. Getting married keeps you busy. And going on a cruise to Hawaii keeps you out of data contact with the outside world. While I haven’t had time to post anything, there have been some goings on around here. Most importantly (to me) is that I’ve…
This weekend I did something that I honestly thought I would never do. There’s been plenty of opportunity throughout my younger years, but as you grow older you tend to outgrow these types of things and I really thought that by this point in my life I’d be past the types of situations that would lead to me breaking a bone. My little toe on my right foot. It hurt. A lot. Broken. Two…
There’s a lot of buzz about the MacBook Air lately, mostly bad. Everyone is wrong. In the future, every Mac user will own three Apple devices. First, a Mac Pro or iMac. People who buy it themselves will usually get an iMac, while people who’s business pays for it will usually get a Mac Pro. Secondly, they’ll all have iPhones, natch. Thirdly, they’ll all have MacBook…
Yes, I did get get a copy of Leopard on Friday. Do I like it? In short, I love it. I’m not going to go into an in depth review, I’m only going to touch on a few things. First, data detectors are the shizzle. What are data detectors? Well, I’ll let Apple describe it : Say you get an email invitation to dinner. What if Mail recognized the address of the restaurant and let you map…
Well, I am safe and well in Los Angeles this week. Sunday night we noticed that the air outside smelled like something was burning, and there was of course very strong winds and low humidity. Monday I left for work like normal and turned on KBG (yes, I get KGB all the way up here in L.A., it’s kind of cool). Dave had been evacuated from his home and wasn’t at the radio station, the…
It just makes for a bad day. Renew it ahead of time like you’re supposed to so you don’t freak out at the last minute.
Today on The Privacy Blog Lance mentions that recently over 100 government e-mail logins were posted online and specifically mentions how with Exchange or IMAP people’s lives are kept in their e-mail accounts. Not only Exchange or IMAP, but also any webmail system. It was demonstrated at BlackHat this year that it’s trivially easy to hijack anybody’s webmail session (hotmail,…
Over the past few days Skype has had a major outage . Now, I realize that Skype is incredibly popular, most notably because their video/voice chat service has an incredible knack for getting around pesky firewalls and routers that routinely block other services . But this simply underscores the need for decentralized networks. Instant messaging is at a crisis in this world. Right now if AIM goes…