/dev/dump

A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos , and we're just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public. We believe that everyone who is interested in OpenSolaris should be interested in what we have to say, and so we invite the entire OpenSolaris community to join us for a presentation on at 1PM EDT on August 3, 2010. You can find out the full details of how to listen in to our conference, or attend in person (we will be announcing from New York City) by visiting http://www.illumos.org/announce (The final details shall be posted there not later than 1PM EDT Aug 1, 2010.) We look forward to seeing you there! - Garrett D'Amore & the rest of the Illumos Cast

With all the ruckus surrounding Oracle's apparent abandonment of the community, and OGB's stated intention to suicide, the community uproar has been crazy. Without giving any details, let me say that a few of us are quietly but diligently working on solutions to the critical problems, and I expect we'll be able to talk much more freely about the solutions we will be offering in early August, which is coming up very soon now. So, I'm going to humbly ask folks to be patient -- hold your comments, complaints, and flames about Oracle and OpenSolaris and OGB in check please. If you can wait just a little bit longer, then I believe we'll be able to offer a more constructive outlet for your frustration and energies. Thanks.

I'll be attending DebConf10 (the Debian developer's conference) in NYC this year. Nexenta will be presenting information about our distribution. Its my hope that we can use this to generate more interest in OpenSolaris technology. If you're in NYC, and want to meet during the first week of August, let me know!

So I've posted this on zfs-discuss at opensolaris dot org, but its been suggested I mention it here too. It turns out that the ZFS/FMA integration doesn't pick up on drive removals for most disk devices until the filesystem attempts to perform some I/O to the drive. This is rather unfortunate, because if a file system is not busy, you might suffer a loss of redundancy and not find out about it until too late. It also means that you won't know about failures of hot spare devices until you need to put them into service, since by definition they are idle. (Note: as an exception running periodic scrubs should detect this too, although scrubs are highly intrusive to the overall I/O load on the system and probably should not be performed too often as a result.) I'm told the Oracle 7000 series appliances have a solution for this problem, but of course the source for that is not in OpenSolaris. (Apparently there are quite a few differences in the core OS between the 7000 s...

(I know its probably questionable using my blog for this, but I thought I'd post it here anyway. My apologies if anyone finds this offensive. I'll keep it brief in any case.) I'm looking for a high-caliber developer, preferably with some kernel and/or OpenSolaris expertise, who's also got extensive knowledge of ActiveDirectory and CIFS. If that's you, or you know someone who fits that description, please contact me -- garrett at nexenta dot com. (No recruiters or agents please.)

So I'm irked, really irked. If we had Skype support for Solaris, I could probably ditch this half baked mess of Linux hosts running VMware guests with OpenSolaris and Nexenta. I want just a single host OS for my development box. Right now the single biggest barrier to running OpenSolaris on my desktop for my job at Nexenta is Skype. But this is silly, because Skype works in Linux, and the APIs should basically be compatible. Especially with the OSS layer that we already have in OpenSolaris these days via Boomer. If someone at Skype sees this (good luck trying to find a contact on their web site!), and wants to work with me on it, I'd be happy to help them work through the issues of getting a native Skype port. If anyone who has an "in" at Skype reads this post, please forward it to your in at Skype. If any folks are paying for business services from Skype, feel free to let them know you want a Solaris client, and there is an expert on the Solaris audio stack waitin...

So, this past weekend my son and I went to LDRS 29, which is the event for the national high-powered rocketry club, Tripoli. We were there only one day and one night, but here were some cool highlights from Saturday: Mass squat launch -- Timothy's Squat with an Aerotech G-67 redline motor flew very nicely, if a bit late off the pad. 28 other rocketeers had their rockets launch at roughly the same time. Many wild squats. With the $29 specials from WhatsUpHobbies, lots of people were flying very unstable Squat rockets with I-140 skidmark engines. This configuration needs nose weight, as we found out for ourselves when we flew Timothy's with the same engine. Four half-scale Patriots launched in 3 second intervals from a "box" launch vehicle -- much like a real Patriot. Very, very cool. Drag race of six or seven N-impulse rockets. These are big rockets, lots of power. Drag race between a number of very detailed rockets. There was a CATO about 20 feet off the pad,...