Happy Fathers Day

Happy Father day to all the Fathers out there. Have a great day.

serve weather

its hard to sleep when there is this many bright colors on the weather map, and they are expecting hail.

those in california aren't used to seeing this many colors on the radar map all the colors are usually associated with loud noise from thunder, lightning, and possibly hail, which is expected in the next few minutes.

Roy Wood has a really interesting number

Just read this really interesting blog entry about an interesting number he recived in an email.

Its really cool. Check it out.

SXCE b115, not ready for prime time

Decided to upgrade my b86 SXCE box to something more recent. But what I got was lots of broken bits instead. Wanted to play with the latest bits, Cross bow, DTrace extensions, etc.

My AMD box was perfectly stable and well performing on b86, I expected a smooth upgrade as usual, but I ran into a lot of headaches.

After what seemed like a nice smooth install, I booted it for the first time, using xVM mode, and on its way to boot up it crashed. Okay i don't mind a few rough edges, and booted back into normal mode with no xVM, which proceeded as expected.

Next step was to do a zpool import and see if it could find my data zpool named "tank", the system found 3 of the 4 drives that make up tank, okay that is scary since it found 3 of the 4 drives, some of the drives were on the motherboard, it found 1 of them as well as the root drive that is in a seperate pool, and it found 2 drives on a pci sata controller, i reseated the power cable and sata cables and tried again, still no luck. I moved the drive that wasn't comping up to a different port on the mother board, still no luck, finally giving up i moved it to the add on card, which is on pci-32bit and it worked. Okay I can breath a bit easier now at least it seems all my data. About 1TB of data, that is mostly not backed up , how do home users backup 1TB of data? not easily.. you keep backups of the important stuff and keep snapshots.

Well I though okay my data is in tact now to get the machine back to doing its job.

Restore passwd shadow group named.conf /etc/bind files to the place and restart dns okay that was easy thanks to the copies of those files that sit on my home directory on the pool i just imported.

Now to get Sun Ray services back up and running. After installing and following the directions, i found that the SRSS still is not happy with the changes to the sockets made back before b107 Bug ID#6799655 even though the bug is labeled fix it still requires the work around and a reboot. So another hour of debugging down.

Now on to tarantella/SGD I re-installed it and run tarantella start and saw mysterious "Segment faults" in the start scripts, not sure what is going on haven't had time to debug them fully, but at least it runs somewhat.

Now to move on to coolstack, I reinstalled it even though all the binaries were imported with my data pool I did the reinstall because i realized that there is no way to reimport the SMF manifests for it, but still this shouldn't be a that big of an issue. That is what I thought anyway. After I did the install that appeared to go with out issues, I attempted to start up mysql, and it failed, I finally tracked down a log file with the error in logged in it, libssl.so.0.97 wasn't being found. Apparently /opt/coolstack/lib/libssl.* symlinked it from /usr/sfw/lib where openssl is no longer there. Okay I tried using some other copies of the libs i had from Blastwave.org still no go.

Webstack 1.4 is supposedly its replacement, I went and downloaded the packages and tried to run ./install, like the README said, it required me to figure out which modules I wanted, after much trial and error all I got was "WS015 This platform is not supported" after verifying I downloaded the correct architecture, and Solaris version I ended up installing the packages manually instead of the nice installer. After 6 hours of debugging, I'm still quite a bit of away from having the machine back to where it was this morning, still need to configure apache, and php.

What a pain what happened to binary compatibility, all this happened from the OS that is supposed to support binaries compiled 10 years ago, as of now it can't even handle binaries compiled a year ago. Hope they fix these issues.

update:
Given up on b115, because twice now while trying to get squid the included one to work I have gotten the system into a crash loop, activate it and it crashes the system and then i crashes the system as it comes back up, first I thought it was my fault in that i did something wrong, so I started over. But nope, twice now. So I'm currently downloading Sol10U7 and going to give it a try.

timf:
asked the question when was the last time xvm worked, and it worked fine in b86 that the system was running before i did this upgrade. Everything worked fine in that relaease. Zero issues, mostly just wanted to upgrade to keep current.

System Config
asus m2a-vm motherboard
amd x5200+ cpu ( dual core 2.5ghz 1MB l2 cache per core)
250 GB sata drive on board. (root pool)
4x 500GB sata drives (data pool) spread betwen the on board controller and a realtek add on board in AHCI mode.
6GB of ram

Gmail + Laptop Tip

I am an owner of a 16” LCD laptop, while the screen is nice in most aspects, but they have a low resolution of 1366 by 768, which is low by today’s standards especially if you’re a geek like me and have at least a 19” screen on your desktop. The one application, well webapp, that I have a problem with on this system is GMAIL with the multiple inboxes (available from the Gmail lab) enabled. I have found a way to make it usable, everyone probably already knows it as I did, but just didn’t make the connection on how useful it would be. Press Ctrl-minus to reduce the size of the font used in the browser. And you can actually get enough text in each of the inboxes.

Two movies one day

Saw “UP 3D” really good movie, not up to Pixar’s normal standard, but Still worth going too. It does suck that most theaters are charging an up charge despite their normal high prices, compounded with expensive food prices.
Hung around and saw Star Trek, really funny, and provided a history to the characters and the scenery didn’t seem too far from the original’s TV show’s décor which I was afraid of.

So two good movies to go and see, just remember always eat before the film, even if it means hitting McDonalds before hand, so you can get out of theater for less than $20 a person.

Google Wave

checked out and signed up wave.google.com looks really cool can't wait to try it out my self