Month: May 2008

I’ll be upfront and say I’m not a big fan of Solaris, sure
it was cool back in the 90s but with the exception of a couple of cute
features like ZFS and perhaps Solaris Services Manager the
whole thing feels like a 1999 Slackware install with a few random multi-gigabyte Java processes using up all the RAM.

The lack of decent package management, old versions of software ( “find -mmin -10” is something I really like to use), slow booting, different device name for every version ( I don’t care what the hardware type is if it moves packets then ethN is a good enough naming convention) and of course random multi-gigabyte Java processes really put me off.

Today my bit of fun was upgrading a Solaris 10 box that needed zfs but had an early version of Solaris 10 that didn’t have it built in. So with Linux I’d just put the box at a server somewhere and “apt-get update” or “yum update” or something. However with Solaris I get to plug in a DVD, boot via it and go half way towards reinstalling the server before I get to the “actually I just want to upgrade some packages” option. Unfortunately at this point I get a little stuck because the installer seems to think that 4 Gigabytes spare on / and 3G spare on each of /var and /usr isn’t enough to upgrade 1G worth of packages. I’ll look at it tomorrow but I’m not impressed with wasting several hours adding and deleting packages ( With a crappy clone of dselect ) in order to try and make it work.

I think Sun’s big problem is that the only people who buy their hardware are either people with large storage requirements who really need ZFS or large companies and government bodies
who have been running Sun Boxes for 20 years and like their support for 20 year old apps.

The first market buy the boxes *despite* the legacy junk that the second group insist on. So Solaris boxes tend to come in two flavours, either they are “vendor shipped” with no Gnutools, no pretty editors and the CDE desktop or they are heavily modified with all of these thing to stop the Linux admins going insane for lack of bash. My last job was close to the first with old Solaris 8 and 9 machines while the current job is closer to the second with Solaris 10 everywhere.

The problem Sun has is that as soon as the feature the first group is after matures enough in Linux then they will drop Sun like a shot and switch over the Linux. With the second group well they aren’t going to Linux as fast but they are like newspaper readers, getting older and not being replaced as fast as they a dieing.

On to more conventional Zombies, here is the Australian short film “I love Sarah Jane“

First up I should mention that with my new job my phone number has changed so
if you think my number is still 027 4xx xxxx then you might have problems
reaching me ( that phone is actually plugged in and in prepay mode but I don’t
carry it around). Email me if you’d like my new number and don’t know it
already.

I just spent a couple of hours looking at the [Sketch Pad](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/columns/sketch_pad/index.html) column
in the New York Times. The column ( publish about once a month, no obvious RSS feed though) “*focuses on an apartment, house, loft or shack now for sale that has unrealized potential. Each month, a different architect or designer is asked to create a vision of what the place might look like. There are no guarantees that the plans would be approved by co-op boards, municipal building departments or planning boards..*” . The
articles feature commentary, photographs and sometimes plans and sketches of the
designs. I particularly like once for small apartments although New York prices are very scary. ( via [Signal vs Noise](http://blogcabin.37signals.com/posts/) )

Also on the subject of housing there is the article [Want to Know When Housing Has Bottomed? Here’s How](http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr08/RE-bottom4-08.html) by Charles Hugh Smith. He
roughly says housing is still priced way of it’s rental value and that estate investment pros
rules of thumb is that the fair value of a property if between 6 and 10 times the annual gross rent. In this part of the world
(where mortgage rates are over 10 percent ) I would guess the average multiplier is more like 20 ( One reason I rent). Of course knowing my luck that just means rentals are going to double over the next few years.

John Allspaw ( operations manager at Flickr ) has posted his slides from his [capacity planning talk to the Web 2.0 Expo](http://www.kitchensoap.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/web20expo-capacityplanning.pdf) (PDF) .

In an interesting move a couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced that one floor of their new Chicago
datacenter will be container based. Each 40 foot container will house 1,000 to 2,000 systems with between 150
and 220 containers on the first floor. See stories in [Data Center Links](http://datacenterlinks.blogspot.com/2008/04/miichael-manos-keynote-at-data-center.html) ,
[Data Center knowledge](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Apr/01/microsoft_embraces_data_center_containers.html) and [James Hamilton’s blog](http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2008/04/02/FirstContainerizedDataCenterAnnouncement.aspx) .

Last up [Barcamp Auckland 2](http://bca.geek.nz/) is happening on the 12th of July. I had
a great time last year and I’ll definitely be going again.
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