/dev/dump

This post discusses the 2nd flag-day putback yesterday, which is Brussels (phase I). Brussels also changes the way NIC drivers are administered, but it is focused on simplifying and centralizing the administration of network driver tunables -- these are the values used to tune the device itself, or in some cases, the link layer properties. The most common of these tunables are the values associated with duplex and link speed settings. Historically these values have been configured with ndd (1M) or driver.conf (4). Many people know how I feel about those methods, but let me just reiterate: "ndd must die!" (And driver.conf, as well.) The Brussels putback represents another opportunity for community members interested in kernel programming though. A lot of these NIC drivers need to be converted to use the property access methods that Brussels offers, and have the ndd support ioctls removed. (And yes, I strongly desire to see the ndd(1M) ioctl support removed from drivers.

Folks watching Nevada putbacks will have noticed at least 3 flag days in the past 24 hours. I want to take a second to talk about the first of them. (I'll talk about the second in a follow up post.) The first, Clearview/UV, is about providing GLDv3-like features to legacy NIC drivers, and about providing friendlier names to device drivers. I will confess that I've not had a chance to play with any of these features yet, but I think that they are likely to be one of the more important putbacks to OpenSolaris this year. This putback fundamentally changes network administration by offering the ability to use "logical naming" for network device drivers. The other important thing here is that some folks may believe that the Nemo Unification offered by Clearview/UV means that those legacy drivers don't need to be converted. This is not true. Conversion to GLDv3 still offers significant and tangible benefits to network device drivers: Performance. The translation

My former Internet service provider, OChosting , was recently purchased by a much larger company, Velocity Networks . As part of that acquisition, they moved my e-mail to some more central server. However, they screwed it up really really badly. The DNS MX records for my domain pointed to an old server, but the CNAME I was using for IMAP was pointing to the old one. The helpdesk was completely useless/powerless to fix the DNS records. (As part of this they were transitioning the old systems to a new management system, ala CPanel, as well. The helpdesk people were only able to deal with accounts that had been transitioned. Finally I told them they'd not only lose my business, but I'd post my negative experiences here if they didn't get someone to help me quickly. That much they did. But ultimately, the promise that DNS records would clear up when caches flushed never materialized. Two weeks later their servers are still giving out incorrect DNS information. I've