• Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware

    Goodbye OpenSolaris/OpenStorage, Hello OpenFiler/OpenDedup

    I’ve read a number of reports over the past couple of days that indicate the demise of Project Wonderland and Open Solaris. As it is open source I would not be surprised to see the project continue, even if forked and retitled in some way. Oracle will continue selling Solaris, but “nothing is for free” is about to take on a whole new meaning. For now it seems that any plans around packaging services around the FOSS stack surrounding former Sun products should be put on hold until further official announcements are made. “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    OpenSolaris 2009.06 First Impressions

    OpenSolaris 2009.06 is the next generation of the OpenSolaris, the Open Source Solaris that has become the testing ground for new features bound for Sun’s popular Solaris Operating System.  The latest version of OpenSolaris sports a number of new features that environments both large and small are sure to find interesting, most of which have to do with more streamlined ways of managing disk, network and other resources – both in virtualization environments and with the operating system itself. First up is package management (using the tool appropriately called Package Manager).  It’s now easier to install software managed/compiled by the OpenSolaris community.  The packaging environment for OpenSolaris can now access…

  • Unix

    Making the case for Solaris

    I recently read an article that Solaris is a dead OS (or will be rather shortly).  I beg to differ, proveded the hardware support is there.  Solaris can still multithread better than anyone.  Solaris’ ZFS is still the most superior file system available (although before the ReiserFS founder got put in prison for wasting his wife it looked poised for greatness) and the Sun hardware is still best of breed.  Sun as a company is also going to be building tighter integration into MySQL, which should help boost numbers.   But the pony-tail-laden chief of Sun definitely has his work cut out for him.  There are certain acquisitions that have…

  • Mass Deployment,  Unix

    LISA 2008

    No, this isn’t the new version of my wife (although there is a new version out and it’s awesome;).  Instead, LISA’08 is the 22nd year of the Large Installation System Administration conference in San Diego California.  LISA runs from November 9 to November 14th of 2008 and looks to be a conference those who do mass deployment might not want to miss.  The biggee this year is virtualization: ESX, ESX 3i, Xen, etc.  But there are alos talks on security, forensics, the Linux Kernel, Performance tools for Solaris and Linux, Perl mods, network performance tuning, wireshark, diskless Linux, SELinux, mass deployment of database servers, disk-to-disk backups for Unix, cfengine, directory…