M: Heya
R: Hey there
M: wassup ?
R: kickstarting an ubuntu box here. How about you ?
M: Just migrated everything to a new file server.
R: Cool. Faced any problems ? How about the ISCSI Initiator ?
M: Naah, the ISCSI initiator worked fine.
R: Nice.


R: Hey
J: Hey. How is everything ?
R: Good.
J: Hey, I fixed that problem with the F1 key on bootup for MachineX.
R: Nice. What was it ?
J: The hard disk cables were not plugged into the correct port on board.
R: Oh. I must check that when I get to the office.

J: The latency between this office B and office P seems high.
R: Let me check right away
* R does some quick checks *
R: The latency between our router and the office P router is very high. Instead of the usual 30 ms, I see 250 ms. This is still within the agreed upon limit of 300 ms, though.

A: Should we opt for source based destination routing or destination based source natting ?
(we ended up using DNAT and SNAT)

Another link http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php

I haven't tried this yet. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Protecting_the_contents_of_the_profile_-_mail

I love Notes myself but then I've been using it for the past seven years and it's the first email client that I used. I did use Outlook Express as well as MS Outlook a bit. I liked them as well, but had to deal with infected emails getting executed etc.

I'm also aesthetically challenged, which means that the Lotus Notes UI is as interesting to me as the MS Outlook UI. But I do also think that the MS Outlook side bar is more interesting that what Notes has to offer (nothing, I think).

So all in all, I don't "get it" when people complain about usability, etc.

Lots of people want alternatives to Notes. I think this is an opportunity to put together a opensource solution., if one doesn't esist. I'd personally like to deliver such a solution on Belenix (www.belenix.org) - an opensolaris based distribution.

A request to readers: Please point me toward research/articles/open source software that either singly or combined provide the various features that Notes does.

What I can do:
- Put together such a solution
This could be a wiki, a howto, a software bundle, etc.

- Make it available for download and testing.

- Start to publicize such a solution in the various mailing lists where there are lots of individual solution providers. As an onetime small business solution provider, I can tell you that there are a number of solution providers/implementors who'd give such a solution a try.

Looking forward to inputs from those who have found alternatives for the various features !

This is a question that I've been asked several times this week.

Here is the FAQ entry entry explaining why

So for those who ask "Why is Sun being selfish and not releasing the ZFS/DTrace/other-good-technologies under the GPL ?", it's because the GPL forbids the linking with code from other licenses, the CDDL does not.

This is why FreeBSD has been able to take the ZFS and DTrace, for e.g.

The other questions on the licensing FAQ are educational too.

Thamarai, who works at Thoughtworks Bangalore, presented some time ago at Jax India 2008.

Here is his presentation titled The Da Vinci Machine: Multi Language Environment for Java Virtual Machine


Read more on the Da Vinci machine here

Nirav pointed me to this educational read The power of the JVM .

Innovations in the JVM space are good news and make for interesting reading always.

Alan McClellan must be one of the calmest persons I've met. Conversations with him are thought provoking. He asks you a question and ask you answer that question, you are forced to think and rethink. I'm certain now that this in itself compells technical people to give him good responses.

Michelle Olson, meanwhile, will be moving on to take over other responsibilities.

The Docs group at opensolaris.org has done great work so far, and I'm excited to help out fixing things that need fixing and writing things that need writing :)

This post by Sue at Artima, titled Outsourcing in my company ? I don't thing so was a reminder that one has to alway strive to excel, should actually excel, and should have a good value proposition.

Lower man-day costs, larger teams to cover attrition risks, and other such measures will definitely not match the value of having a technically superior team that knows how to deliver architecturally sound solutions that are scalable, extensible, have the bigger perspective in mind, and can be trusted to run upon deployment.

Based on our roadmap , we've released the next revision of Belenix .

Here are the screenshots . Make sure you look at the Firefox screenshot - based on KDE Widgets.

We've packaged KDE 3.5.8, and also provice XFCE and Compiz.

This is a LiveCD, and you can also install everything to your hard disk.

We're going to have a Belenix developer meet soon, stay tuned for more news !

As an Infrastructure person, I work with people from different departments.

Recently, I spent some time helping the Studios team to get the new Mingle 2.0 product site up and running.

Based on my experiences with the team, I can say that this is a team that:
- believes in the product
- has tested the product as much as they can
- believes in providing helpful answers to the customer
- will support the customer

Visit The Thoughtworks Studios website, download Mingle 2.0, and give it a try.

So what is Mingle useful for ?
Collaboration
Project Management
Release Planning
Tracking and Reporting
Program Management
Test and Issue Tracking

These are activities that are performed in most projects in life. I'm talking about construction, mergers and acquisitions, educational courses, automation projects, and other such activities where one needs visibility into various aspects of a series of tasks. Software Development is just one of the many activities :)

Mingle is a useful tool to organize and manage tasks. Take the Quick Tour or watch the videos to learn more.

Even if you are against buzzwords (agile, metrics, etc), you can still go ahead and use Mingle. That's because Mingle gives you functionality and is not focused on being buzzword-compliant :)

An interesting thing about Mingle is the cost of the product itself.

It's free for personal use. It's also free for open source projects, academic use, and non profit projects. Next, the first five user licenses are always free. You need to pay the license fees only for more number of users. As the site says, if you are an eight person team, you need to buy licenses for only three people.

The actual site has much more information .

This marketing team also believes in being really accessible. You can request a call , request a webex demo , or attend webcasts

The support team and the marketing team work closely together - except that the support team handles the support :) They regularly monitor the forums and respond to support requests as well.

Incidentally, the Studios support and the marketing team sit at the same table. So, information is always exchanged, and the developers in turn are always kept updated about support issues, marketing queries and the like. This helps the development team understand better what customers seek, what they prefer to use, and what their pain points are.

About three weeks ago, I had the good fortune of seeing a Mingle developer fix certain issues and run the complete set of tests, check in code with the exact number of files needed and with his comments on the fix. As anyone who uses version control systems in a team will attest, such practices help one identify the exact point at which a problem or a feature was introduced or fixed as the case may be. What struck me then was the discipline that this developer followed.

It is very reassuring to know that the people I support are so diligent in their work and that they care so much for their work, the product that they work on, and for the customers.

So download Mingle 2.0 , and give it a try. Read about how Mingle could help you.

Write in with your queries and feedback, and rest assured that you will get a response.

It feels good to be able to say all this about a team :)

http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/documentation/tutorials/d_light_tutorial/index.html

It has no where the polish that Instruments on OSX has, though.

But looks good for a first cut.

(Update: Corrected spellings.. I really need to fix my sleep cycle !)

While reading a blog post on DTrace, I chanced across a comment talking about how learning Linux can be fun. (see the comment by Chris Cox on this page http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/dtrace_knockoffs).

I recall reading the slackware 1.2 howtos on my (286 16 Mhz/1MB RAM/ 20 MB HDD) and building a "linux emulator" because my 286 wouldn't boot a Linux kernel (which needed a 386). That was really fun then: I was a hardware technician, and had decided to teach myself C. I had also sensed that this Linux thing could become a very important OS to know in the future. Since I couldn't run Slackware, I decided to write an emulator that'd give me the same experience. It was a crazy thing to set out to do, give that my only program written until then was a printf of "This is a test message". (I hadn't met any other programmer till then and so hadn't heard of "Hello, world!" until years later). Until then, I'd only installed SCO 3.4.2 on 286 boxes for the Indian Railways.

Learning Linux was more fun later when I was a lecturer at Aptech. We once lost the SCO box, and the sysadmin was being difficult about it ("I'll need management permission to install another SCO system"). So I went ahead and did a UMSDOS install of slackware 2.0. This was really a _lot_ of fun, because the entire system lived in a folder that was a 25 MB arj file (arj was a great archiver, with -j9 giving better compression than pkzip). During the day, we'd all go about our work. And then when the sysad left at 8 pm, I'd unarj that slackware folder, startup a local server, and all my students from the 8 to 10 pm batch would have great fun working with the slackware box :)

Present day distributions give too much of GUI. Modern tools too give lots of conveniences into the hands of developers, to the extent that many folks who've been using only windows or Visual Studio haven't really any clue of using command line based tools - they don't need to.

I think that there's something nice about exploring a system from the command line. You start to use a lot of tools that exercise the system API - tools that a developer might sometimes not have the time or inclination or the tools to add a GUI to.

The command line need not be an inconvenience or a limitation. A good shell coupled with a variety of command line based tools can help one explore a system a lot.

Now-a-days, I only get the feeling that I'm playing with a Linux machine when I'm assembling it together form spare parts and from source. Kickstart based installations take away some of that fun. Gentoo based builds are a pleasure, because you have almost complete insight into exactly what is going into your box.

The Belenix project is interesting to me for very much the same reason. We're going to continue to give a good user experience as compared to plain old Nimbus themed Solaris Express Developer Edition, we're going to add packaging support, we're going to ensure that lots of indigeneous open source projects will be showcased.

And Belenix will continue to include all those tools that make Solaris great. One would be able to play with Zones, ZFS, DTrace, FMA, SMF, RBAC, and much more. And if you need to have a GUI, then one could wither write Ruby bindings and use the Ruby QT bindings to write GUI tools for these, or even learn QT and write a QT based GUI anyway ! :)

Playing with Crossbow should be possible too... imagine creating complete and fully functional WANs on your machine without having to resort to the otherwise excellent Wanem toolkit (emulation and not the real thing) ! Imagine being able to dtrace packets as they move through your various Zones on the same machine. Imagine having the power that a Cisco admin has, but getting to do it all on your standalone laptop or desktop !

And then, for Ruby enthusiasts, there's a DTrace instrumented Ruby coming up for general use :)

Finally, Belenix will be completely documented - right from what to download and how to build it all yourself, to having the really friendly Bangalore Open Solaris User Group members and the Belenix community and well wishers worldwide helping you learn that Solaris is not a different (and therefore restrictive to you) command shell, or an ugly (to some and not to others, the default Solaris Express Gnome theme can be ugly) GUI.

Learning and using OpenSolaris can be a lot of fun.

Stay tuned to this blog for more news on Belenix ! :)

http://wikis.sun.com/display/DTrace/dtrace.conf

I'm missing it by a measly few hours :(

But this promises to be a great gathering :)

A network admin at a customer site asked me to send traffic to him from a particular external IP address from the IP address pool that we have. This was so that he'd be able to give IP address based permissions to incoming connections.

Apart from making the required changes at various points (the various routers and firewalls that we have), I needed to establish that the http and ftp traffic goes out via the particular external IP only.

For http, one can visit www.whatismyip.com

For ftp, here's what you do:
- ftp ftp.kernel.org
- user: anonymous
- password: user@somewhere.net

Once you're logged on, give the command:
literal stat

This sends a command to the server asking it to give some information. One of the elements of this information is the IP address that the server sees you connecting from.

e.g. (I've changed the IP address to 33.43.120.51 for the purpose of this online post, and I've turned debugging on)

ftp> literal stat
211-FTP server status:
Connected to 33.43.120.51
Logged in as ftp
TYPE: ASCII
No session bandwidth limit
Session timeout in seconds is 300
Control connection is plain text
Data connections will be plain text
At session startup, client count was 41
vsFTPd 2.0.4 - secure, fast, stable
211 End of status

Ketan pointed me to Xul Booster . I'm glad that someone went ahead and got started on an IDE (though I wish it were me)

I'm now able to use Lotus Notes 6.5.2 as well as 7.0.1 on SXDE :)

What didn't work was the installer itself. I had to set up a Lotus Notes instance on Windows, and then copy that folder over to Solaris using a USB drive.

Building Wine on SXDE required that I get the JDS to build first. My post to the BOSUG covers these steps.

Now, to install compiz and then pester the oss folks for a fix for the MacBookPro ! :)

Say you've got an operating system with lots of tools and applications. But the compiler for it all is closed. And the company supplying the compiler shuts down, or chooses to not make that compiler available to you.

Where do you go now ?

Having a free tool chain is vital.

After a great talk at the Sun Tech Days on this very topic, I've decided to move to OpenSolaris once and for all.

A bit of introspection revealed some problems with my moving to OpenSolaris which I've started to address today itself:

1. vpn connectivity
I got vpnc to work today. I'll add a spec file to the pkgbuild repository (the SFE repository) later this week.

2. Lotus Notes on Solaris
Got Xen, Wine and Virtual Box to work. One or the other of these would be enough to use Lotus Notes from within Solaris. Once I get to office tomorrow, I intend to install Notes on Wine, failing which I'll install Notes on either a Xen or a Virtual Box instance.
One might say that the longer term solution is to do away with Notes altogether, but that is outside the scope of this series of articles.

3. A better GUI environment than the Solaris default Gnome theme called Nimbus.
Some like Nimbus, I don't. Moink got me up and running with a gcc built KDE 3.5.8 which works fast enough.

4. RDP connectivity to Windows hosts
I've built rdesktop from the SFE specs. Works great. I was able to connect to the office servers without problems on my 256 kbps line.

5, Sound.
The OSS drivers aren't able to play audio on my MacBookPro. I've written on the forum and will be taking up this very soon.

On a larger note, there is one reason why moving away from the Mac Book Pro may be hard for me:
1. Apple Certified MAc Hardware Technician Certification.
Like it or not, Apple will not provide the kind of on site support that Dell does. So we sysadmins have to go get Mac certified in order to legally replace / swap parts on the MacBookPros.

I can't help but notice the irony here. We have some colleagues who're making the fullest use of the Macs. We have others who're running Windows on these full time, we have other who just use the OS for launching Notes and Firefox and for their Java IDE. And we have me who's decided that the learning and technology advancements that Solaris offers are definitely worth forsaking the porting heaven that the Mac offers, but I can't move away from the Mac.

Getting back to OpenSolaris as a desktop environment - I'd say that it is ready for use in most cases, but is not an Ubuntu/Kubuntu like environment yet. And that's a problem which we are going to address :)

The first impression can unfortunately be a lasting impression. Yesterday, I installed the near-latest Solaris Express build 81 on my Macbook pro in a dual boot mode.

I usually customize a fresh install of SXDE after installation:
- change the default folder for the root user to /export/home
- change the /export/home folder to be a ZFS file system.
- change the default shell to be bash (because I want to use the up, down and the backspace keys on the keyboard).
- ensure that /usr/gnu/bin is in the path.
- mount /export/home/opt as /opt
- Download and install Apache Ant 1.7.0 and add it to the PATH
- Set the JAVA_HOME and ANT_HOME environment variables.

These tasks take me under five minutes to complete.

Yesterday, unfortunately, I chose to install a custom release of Eclipse (which ended up having flawed packaging), and then excitedly called Ketan over to test SWTBot on my new OS installation. I completely forgot to change the default shell and the default editor.

Within seconds, he ended up having to use:
- a shell with limited editing functionality as compared to bash
- a limited functionality vi editor

Having to use just these two things gave him a very bad experience with Solaris itself.

Now if he, being a very skilled power user (and Gentoo enthusiast) can get irritated, imagine the plight of the average user who's about to try Solaris for the first time !

Never mind having the best of DTrace and file systems, etc. If the initial user experience is bad, then the overall impression will also be bad.

The Belenix and the Indiana projects are a step in the right direction. With a focus on KDE/XFCE and Gnome based desktops (respectively), Belenix and Indiana are both bringing a better user experience with the OpenSolaris ecosystem. Nexenta has gone on to provide stability to their interesting GNu and Solaris flavors for the command line and application environments.

I'm myself convinced that Solaris itself is very useful and powerful, and that if end users need to use it, then some steps are needed.
Providing a shell that users are familiar with is one step, providing applications that users are familiar with is another step. Educating users on what's available and how it could benefit them is yet another step.

This is the theme of my presentation at the Sun Tech Days on Wednesday, when I'll be speaking in place of Ananth Srinivas.