I've just announced the latest release of Tribblix - m39, now available for download and upgrades. This follows the "when I feel like it" release model. Which means that (a) I have some potentially breaking changes that need a release boundary to navigate, and (b) enough time has passed that I feel the need to update illumos to pick up any recent changes. There's no hard timescale, but for regular…
I've actually been using IPv6 on and off since the late 1990s - there was an addon for Solaris 2.6 that we installed on a bunch of test machines. It worked great, but wasn't something we ever did properly in production because at the time none of our customers had IPv6. I've wanted to use IPv6 more, but my home ISP has never had it. Until recently, when I noticed my main machine (running Tribblix,…
Yesterday I had a trip up to London and had a wander round Infosecurity Europe . It was an interesting day, lots of things to see, many interesting conversations. The show itself is huge. We've clearly come out of the doldrums of the last few years where shows had become tiny. And this was a dedicated infosec event, not just one part of a larger IT event. Going by the size of the event, the number…
I have a little private project called xTribblix . What's the x stand for? eXtreme? eXtraordinary? eXperimental? neXt generation? Honestly, I don't know. It doesn't matter, it's just a little bucket I can drop things in to. But essentially, a set of experiments around changing Tribblix that allows me to do interesting things. The aim would be that, if successful, they get folded back into regular…
Years ago, I was in a meeting when a C-level executive proclaimed: IT systems run at less than 10% utilization on average, so we're moving to the cloud to save money. The logic behind this was that you could run systems in the cloud that were the size you needed, rather than the size you had on the floor. Of course, this particular claim was specious. Did he know the average utilization of our…
I've been trying to get my head around all this Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3 emissions malarkey. Although it appears that lots of people smarter than me are struggling with it . Having spent a while looking at how the Scopes are defined , I can understand how this can be difficult. OK, Scope 1 is an organisation's direct emissions. Presumably an organisation knows what it's doing and how it's doing…
AI is all the rage right now. It's everywhere, you can't avoid it. But what is AI? I'm not going to try and answer that here. What I will do, though, is state the question somewhat differently: What is meant by "AI" in a given context? And this matters, because the words we use are important. The reality is that when you see AI mentioned it really could be almost anything. Some things AI might…
I recently added a ddu like capability to Tribblix. In that article I showed the devices in a bhyve instance. As might be expected there really aren't a lot of devices you need to handle. What about SPARC, you might ask? Even if you don't, I'll ask for you. Running Tribblix in a LDOM, this is what you see: root@sparc-m32:/root# zap ddu Device SUNW,kt-rng handled by n2rng in TRIBsys-kernel-platform…
I recently went down to the smoke, to Tech Show London . There were 5 constituent shows, and I found what each sub-show was offering - and the size of each component - quite interesting. There wasn't much going on in Devops Live, to be honest. Relatively few players had shown up, nothing terribly interesting. There wasn't that much in Big Data & AI World either. I was expecting much more here, and…
Somewhat uniquely among illumos distributions, Tribblix doesn't require installation to ZFS - it allows the possibility of installing to a UFS root file system. I'm not sure how widely used this is, but it will get removed as an option at some point, as the illumos UFS won't work past Y2038. I recently went through the process of testing an install of the very latest Tribblix to UFS, in a bhyve…
Introducing a new feature in Tribblix m36. There's a new ddu subcommand for zap. In OpenSolaris, the Device Driver Utility would map the devices it found and work out what software was needed to drive them. This isn't that utility, but is inspired by that functionality, rewritten for Tribblix as a tiny little shell script. As an example, this is the output of zap ddu for Tribblix in a bhyve…
Before I even start, let's be clear: there are an awful lot of things currently being bundled under the "AI" banner, most of which of neither artificial nor intelligent. So when I'm talking about AI here, I'm talking about what's being marketed to the masses as AI. This generally doesn't include the more traditional subjects of machine learning or image recognition, which I've often seen…
I use a number of tools in static code analysis for my projects - primarily Java based. Mostly codespell checkstyle shellcheck PMD SpotBugs Wait, I hear you say. Spell checking? Absolutely, it's a key part of code and documentation quality. There's absolutely no excuse for shoddy spelling. And I sometimes find that if the spelling's off, it's a sign that concentration levels weren't what they…
I had to spend a little time recently fixing a crash in OpenJDK on Solaris SPARC. What we're seeing is, from the hs_err file: # A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment: # # SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0xffffffff57c745a8, pid=18442, tid=37 ... # Problematic frame: # V [libjvm.so+0x7745a8] G1CollectedHeap::allocate_new_tlab(unsigned long, unsigned long, unsigned long*)+0xb8 Well…
What's a decent length for a password? I think it's pretty much agreed by now that longer passwords are, in general, better. And fortunately stupid complexity requirements are on the way out. Reading the NIST password rules gives the following: User chosen passwords must be at least 8 characters Machine chosen passwords must be at least 6 characters You must allow passwords to be at least 64…
The Tribblix live ISO and related images are put together every so slightly differently in the latest m34 release. All along, there's been an overlay (think a group package) called base-iso that lists the packages that are present in the live image. On installation, this is augmented with a few extra packages that you would expect to be present in a running system but which don't make much sense…
I've been building OpenJDK on Solaris and illumos for a while. This has been moderately successful; illumos distributions now have access to up to date LTS releases, most of which work well. (At least 11 and 17 are fine; 21 isn't quite right.) There are even some third-party collections of my patches, primarily for Solaris (as opposed to illumos) builds. I've added another tool. The SunOS jdk…
With OpenSolaris and derivatives such as illumos, we gained the ability to build a whole IT infrastructure in a single box, using virtualized networking (crossbow) to build the underlying network and then attaching virtualized systems (zones) atop virtualized storage (zfs). Some of this was present in Solaris 10, but it didn't have crossbow so the networking piece was a bit tricky (although I did…
Any operating system distribution - and Tribblix is no different - will have a bunch of packages for python modules. And one thing about python modules is that they tend to depend on other python modules. Sometimes a lot of python modules. Not only that, the dependency will be on a specific version - or range of versions - of particular modules. Which opens up the possibility that two different…
While a bit under the weather last week, I decided to try and fix what at first glance appears to be a simple problem: need to ship the manpage with exa Now, exa is a modern file lister, and the package on Tribblix doesn't ship a man page. The reason for that, it turns out, is that there isn't a man page in the source, but you can generate one. To build the man page requires pandoc. OK, so how to…
On the Solaris 10 Platinum Beta program, one of the most exciting promised features was ZFS, the new file system. I was especially interested, given that I was in a data-heavy position at the time. The limits of UFS were painful, we had datasets into several terabytes already - and even the multiterabyte file system support that got added was actually pretty useless because the inode density was…
The Service Management Facility, or SMF, integrated extremely late in the Solaris 10 release cycle. We only got one or two beta builds to test, which seemed highly risky for such a key feature. So there was very little time to gather feedback from users. And something that central really can't be modified once it's released. It had to work first time. That said, we did manage some improvements.…
One of the slightly unusual features in illumos, and Solaris because that's where it came from, is isaexec . This facility allows you to have multiple implementations of a binary, and then isaexec will select the best one (for some definition of best). The full implementation allows you to select from a wide range of architectures. On my machine it'll allow the following list: amd64…
It's something I've been putting off for far too long, but it's about time to modernize all the shell scripts that Tribblix is built on. Part of the reason it's taken this long is the simple notion of, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But some of the scripting was starting to look a bit ... old. Antiquated. Prehistoric, even. And there's a reason for that. Much of the scripting involved in…
Sadly, the trick described below won't work in current releases of Solaris, or any of the illumos distributions. But back in the day, it was pretty helpful. In Solaris 10, we had sparse root zones - which shared /usr with the global zone, which not only saved space because you didn't need a copy of all the files, but creating them was much quicker because you didn't need to take the time to copy…