Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more
Please post your thoughts on Jonathan's leaving. Its a mixed emotion... on one hand he set some great goals and put a fire under things. A lot of us believed in him. And yet, he failed to execute and ultimately was responsible for Sun's demise. Could someone else have done a better job and still kept the culture alive? I don't know honestly.
I'll continue to stay neutral on the subject and reserve judgment until the behind-the-scenes stories trickle out over the next months and years. Jonathan screwed up, yes, but I think that Jonathan also got screwed himself, more than we realize. Time will tell.
In other news, Oracle is finally doing what has needed to be done for years: Oracle to Revamp Sun Supply Chain. One of the biggest complaints by customers for years has been inability to get timely delivery of systems. Its good to see signs of that era ending.
Also, Project Darkstar & Kenai are being axed. Project Kenai, a SourceForge like project hosting service provided free by Sun, will close its doors on April 2nd 2010. You have untill then to get stuff out. One of the most important projects there, Immutable Service Containers (ISC) has moved to OpenSolaris.org.
]]>Congratulations on the EU approval of your acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Many of us in the various Sun communities spent years working closely with Oracle products on Sun technology and feel right at home being part to the Oracle family. The business savvy and dedication to customer success will be a welcome change in the direction of all of Sun's technologies.
While the strategy webcasts and FAQs have been fantastic, there are many questions customers have regarding the future of Solaris, OpenSolaris and the technologies within. It's no secret that for several months Oracle has been involved to some degree in Sun engineering directions and therefore it does not seem unreasonable to ask for answers even so soon after the EU green-light.
First, and of foremost concern, is the future of the Solaris product for enterprise customer, currently "Solaris 10". Will there be a Solaris 11? (It would fit nicely with Oracle's scheme, btw.) Will it be compatible with existing Solaris technologies (Jumpstart, SysV PKGs, etc) or will the existing path to scrap these technologies in favor of new and unproven solutions created within the OpenSolaris platform be chosen instead?
Please understand that until recently customers could choose the traditional product (Solaris 10), the advanced development product (OpenSolaris Distribution), or use the bridge between these two worlds: Solaris Express Community Edition(SX:CE). However, with SX:CE's recent retirement Solaris shops are forced to make a choice: go forward and accept uncomfortable and disruptive changes of OpenSolaris Distro or fall back into the technically inferior but fully supported and well understood Solaris 10. Sadly, some are opting to leave all together due to a lack of direction.
Decisions need to be made and customers need guidance in order to make them. Consistent with Sun's legacy, the OpenSolaris project has been phenomenally successful in empowering customers and driving innovation, however management has continually failed to produce a coherent roadmap for enterprises to bank on.
Therefore, I would humbly ask that Oracle definitively provide guidance on the following:
I look forward to these details which will hopefully put an end to the Solaris FUD and put us back on a path of profitable and productive growth, for the sake of the community, customers, and Oracle itself.
Ben Rockwood
(Open)Solaris Developer & Evangelist
Oracle hosted a 5 hour (yes, 5) event in Redwood City (Oracle HQ) to lay out its strategy for Sun.
Find all the above webcasts, both full and highlights, plus slide decks, here: Oracle + Sun: Transforming the IT Industry. If you only watch one, make sure to watch the final webcast with Larry which is an open Q&A.
(Selfish note: Joyent's logo is on the customers slide in the Operating Systems and Virtualization presentation. w00t.)
This is followed up by a Oracle + Sun Welcome Event world tour beginning in March. Look for an event near you.
In addition, several webcasts have been produce in the last couple weeks discussing technologies and the strategy going forward. Find them all here: Oracle + Sun Product Strategy Webcast Series.
So onto the guys who got us here in the first place.
Jonathan returns to blogging, "With the passing of that milestone, I can once again speak freely", in Where Life Takes Me Next.... He tells us how great things will be now that he's not running the company, points us to his Twitter feed, and yet again extols the brilliance of Greg Papadopoulos.
Now, I probably shouldn't pick a fight with Mr. Papadopoulos, but here goes. We hear again and again how brilliant this guy is... but look where we are. Seriously, how can you stand on the ruins of a fallen empire saved only because a neighbor took pity on us, and then tell us how brilliant one of the guys in charge was? I know I'm going to regret saying that, but he should have been smart enough to beat some sense into folks. I digress....
Scott McNealy, who took over for Jonathan either because the job wasn't getting done or because he wanted to take credit for "saving" the company (I'm not sure which yet; maybe both), sent out a old-skool company wide memo: Subject: Thanks for a great 28 years. Best summary of the situation was: "This is a very powerful merger. And way better than some of the alternatives we were facing. " Then he starts threading in capitalism, almost blaming but not blaming, the system as a whole for stacking the deck. I sense a story behind it all.
Scott gives us the answer to the horrible question "Why?!?!" We all know it, but its good to hear him admit it: "And though we did not monetize our inventions as well as we could have..." Under. Statment. Of. All Time.
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Yesterday Pastor Mark preached a special sermon which told the entire story of his trip. If your interested in the situation on the ground in Haiti and particularly in the state of the churches there watch the sermon here: 32 Hours in Haiti
If you would like to help the churches in Haiti to continue helping the people of Haiti please consider a donation to churcheshelpingchurches.com.
]]>There will be a Oracle + Sun Strategy Update Webcast on Wed the 27th, so make sure to tune in for that. The invite was sent out yesterday, so looks like Oracle got early notice.
]]>If there was a way, we had two options. First, we could run "useradd" with truss and look at any files its trying to open and then search Google. But thats not very educational. So I opted for the second method, that is to go to src.opensolaris.org, search for the useradd.c code and read through it. Within about 2 minutes we had our answer.
Turns out he was absolutely right, useradd look at /usr/sadm/defadduser and if it exists reads default values from it. You can see the default parameters its looking for and the format in userdefs.h line 47. So from that we created the following file (/usr/sadm/defadduser):
## Ben's test defuseradd file: /usr/sadm/defadduser ## http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/head/userdefs.h#89 defrid=99 defgroup=99 defgname=other defparent=/home defskel=/etc/skel defshell=/usr/bin/bash definact=0 defexpire= defauthorization= defprofile= defrole= defproj=3 defprojname=default deflimitpriv= defdefaultpriv= deflock_after_retries=
Now test it, and sure enough its working. In this case we're only overriding the default shell, changing from /bin/sh to /usr/bin/bash:
$ useradd alex $ tail -1 /etc/passwd alex:x:501:99::/home/alex:/usr/bin/bash
One word of caution is that you will want to specify all the values in the defaults file (/usr/sadm/defadduser)... if the value is empty it will use no value.
So this was a fun problem which not only showed a new flexibility that I was unaware of but showcased the awesome power of open source and accessibility via OpenGrok. Viva la code!
]]>You'll notice my last post was an exuberant burst of Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris/X86 joy.... and I was obsessed like a madman for about a week straight. Oracle 11g R2 is the first release of the Oracle database that has entirely and completely impressed me. Namely because it just works! For instance, since the introduction of Enterprise Manager (8i I think?) its never actually worked properly for me, something was always wrong or flimsy and no matter how many times I re-installed I couldn't get it right... with 11g R2 is worked flawlessly. No more messing with listener configuration thanks to wizards that actually work. The installer did its thing brilliantly and you don't even need to tell it to ignore pre-reqs anymore, it just asks you. You can install from start to finish in 15 minutes and be playing.
Of course, this put me in this wierd position of having a lot of time to actually play with the features of the database instead of fix install issues or tuning crap. And so I engrossed myself in its world and got a renewed appreciation for the robustness of features present in Oracle. Yes its big and bloated, but for the first time with 11g it doesn't feel big and bloated. This is partially because of the simplicity of install and configuration, but also because the lowest common denominator in workstation hardware has finally caught up with the robustness of the database... no more lumbering database on a Sun Blade workstation or Ultra2, on my consumer grade Intel Quad-Core it just rocks along.
What happened next was an odd turn of fate. After playing with all the features of the database I could think of I wanted into its OLAP capabilties and then got re-interested with Business Intelligence (BI) software. I checked out Oracle's various industry specific application suites and looked around at SAP and SAS's new offerings, caught up with PeopleSoft and JD Edwards and spend a lot of time researching the history of consolidation of BI tools over the last couple of years that I paid little attention to at the time.
I then got off on a tangent with security... but before long I was digging deep into ISO27001 which pushed me into ISO20000 which unfolded into ITIL and CobiT and CMMI and COSO and PMBOK and PRINCE2 and on and on. Knee deep in a pile of standards I've mostly avoided for some time now and with a renewed interest in procedures for building serviced based IT departments. Naturally this re-converged with Oracle and SAP and SAS.
The spiral got so violently out of control, buried under piles of laserjet paper (22lbs paper, only the best of course), that I essentially had to hit the reset button on my brain and ended up researching ADHD for a couple of days, picking up a great deal of pointers in the process. All this came back into focus after Christmas as I've tried to cleanup and re-organize all my personal projects which have grown like monsters on rampage.
Many of you have a passion for learning, growing, improving. But maybe you've hit places like I do, every so often, where you sort of hit a point at which you are so entrenched in an area that you question its practicality. I mean, at what point am I going to need to espouse the merits of CMMI? When have you gone so far down the rabbit hole that your loosing touch with the reality of your station? It's good to stretch yourself and learn new things, but at some point, without a rigorous structure on which to build, the weight becomes to great to bear and you collapse under the pressure.
And so now I'm re-engaged, back on the GTD wagon, and lining up for a good new year. I didn't plan it to coincide with New Years but it just sort of happened that way. And why shouldn't it? This is about the time last year that I figured I'd finally trash my current blogging software (Pivot) and migrate to WordPress, redesign the site and start doing video content.... which of course never happened. Startup life still hasn't really left me enough spare cycles to invest sufficient time to get it all done. January is going to be crazy but maybe February will allow me the time to update things.
Anyway... 2010 is upon us. Oracle should close the acquisition of Sun by the end of January. SX:CE is supposed to die any time now. ZFS Dedup is here but ZFS Encr still lagging. The Oracle 11g R2 release stands to shake up things and hopefully re-inject enterprise attention to Solaris. But really, who knows.
I'll be honest, 2010 is going to be a very tough year. Most of the question about Oracle's intentions are sorted out, but what will really happen? OpenSolaris, Solaris 10, Solaris Next... whats really going to happen this year? I'm not sure we can say. It could be time for a big change, or maybe not. I just don't think there is enough data to tell. I can say that some big changes are needed to make all the Nevada goodness trickle back into a proper enterprise release and OpenSolaris sure as hell isn't it, but what? S11? S10 Update 9? I just don't know. And with the rise of Oracle's fight with IBM, will AIX and HP-UX rise anew? Who can tell?
So, lets all raise a pint and toast to the year and enjoy it while it lasts... history will be made soon and lets all hope that we're a whole lot more excited when 2010 winds down 365 days from now.
Happy New Years folks.
]]>Let there be great rejoicing! Oracle 11g R2 has been released for X86!!! So snubbed was Solaris/X86 that there was no release for Oracle 11g (R1)... but that time has passed and R2 is available on BOTH SPARC & X86. w00t! Only 5 years of checking daily... I knew it would pay off eventually. ;)
]]>It's become crystal clear, for those not following the issue, that this is really all about MySQL. As I and others have sited repeatedly, the de facto standard MySQL engine for enterprise deployments is InnoDB which is already owned by Oracle, which really puts a big dent in the argument. All this makes you wonder, would Oracle have still acquired Sun if they didn't own MySQL? I tend to think, yes. Which makes that deal seem all the more ridiculous. All the same, Sun paid $1B for it, so the suggestion that Oracle should just let that entity break back off is even more ridiculous, not to mention just bad business.
]]>It should be said that there have been a lot of exciting enhancements to Nevada over the last couple of builds. Here are some of the changes in the last couple builds:
If your not running at least Build 121 your really behind the times, and I highly recommend that if you have the time to install SX:CE 127 and BFU up to 128... or, if your busy with the holidays, make sure you set aside some time in December to really dig into the new hotness when SX:CE 128 releases.
UPDATE: It was announced that there shall be No SXCE 128 Release due to CR 6903705. So if you were waiting to avoid a BFU or full compile you should bother waiting unless you can hold out till mid December for 129.
Also, do remember, the clock is ticking on SX:CE. I still have hopes for a reprieve from the powers that be to keep SX:CE alive, but you never know. If that happens either be prepared to get really comfortable with BFU or code building, or get ready to embrace Indiana with both arms. Solaris 10 proper is of course an option, but not a great one.
UPDATE 2: Changed link to the re-spin snv_128b. ]]>
I mean, come on... his advice on careers "Find what you don't do well.... and don't do that thing." Classic!
Need something more expansive? Learn Chinese! If you find it difficult, try to learn Japanesse... and then you'll go back and appreciate how much easier Chinese languages are.
Not intellectual enough? Need to stretch those brain cells a bit more? Then, I ask, what is justice? As a Christian I have all those answers, laid down thousands of years ago, but since apparently folks like to re-invent the wheel (something King Solomon explained to us about 1,000 BC... "There is nothing new under the sun"), try Harvard's Michael Sandel discussion on Justice. A fun and engaging discussion in one of Harvard's beautiful facilities, exploring the "Moral Side of Murder". It's an enjoyable mental exercise and well expressed.
And finally, since I mentioned Christianity, if you are not a Christian but curious about it, here is a recent and awesome sermon from Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Watch it, argue with it, think about it, I think you'll enjoy it. Pastor Mark is always fun.
If your reading this post on an aggregator or via RSS and don't see the embedded video, just come here to cuddletech to see it properly.
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Now, please note that I do not have nor do I ever plan to have a Mac desktop! For my daily work I need a real UNIX Workstation. I prefer to work with Enlightenment, Eterm, and have a real Solaris system on which to work. Without my desktop I can't accomplish real work, but for the road I need my MacBook Pro.
So here are some of my "must have apps" for OS X:
I'll add some more to the honorable mention list...
On the hardware side, every UNIX Admin must be able to access an RS-232 serial console. This fact kept me away from Mac laptops for a long time. Which is why you need this:
The Keyspan Serial-USB Adapter. Buy one, download the Keyspan Assistant software and install Zterm. Good to go!
Finally let me point out 2 things which are already in Leopard that you may not be aware of:
First, with the OS on the Install disk is the Apple Xcode IDE. Along with Xcode is the koolest GUI for DTrace you'll ever see: Instruments Its really amazingly awesome and a must see.
Secondly, OS X includes native Kerberos support and a ticket management GUI which is sort of buried: /System/Library/CoreServices/Kerberos. If you use Kerberos at all drag that binary onto your doc for quick access. Several other hidden gems can be found in the same directory.
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