As days goes by, more and more multi-core systems are popping up everywhere. Infact, with the advent of the new 4-socket quad-core Sun Fire X4450 , 16-core systems are soon becoming common out there.

However,personally, I think these systems are still underutilized from their true potentials.  Of course virtualization is a way of increasing the utilization but  that is like working around the symptoms and not fixing the real problems. Software Applications fundamentally has lagged behind the microprocessor innovations. Operating Systems too have lagged behind too. Solaris, however advanced opertating system has still lot to achieve in this area. For example, yes the kernel is multi-threaded, yes it can scale well easily to 100s of cores but that scaling is generally achieved by creating copies of the process (or multiple connections or multiple threads however you look at it) at the APPLICATION level.  One area however …

It recently came up that it would be helpful if we had a cheat sheet to find out the machine names for any given UNIX. I knew these off the top of my head but it would be great if people added more as comments.

HP/HP-UX: /bin/uname -i
IBM/AIX: /bin/uname -m
SGI/IRIX: /sbin/sysinfo -s
Sun/Solaris: /usr/ucb/hostid

Just recently I seem to have noticed an increased number of mysterious crashes and terminations of applications. This is generally on brand new systems that I’m setting up, or on existing systems where I’m setting up a new or duplicate account.

Initially everything is fine, but then all of a sudden as I start syncing over my files, shell profile and so on applications will stop working. I’ve experienced it in MySQL, and more recently when starting up Gnome on Solaris 10 9/07.

Sometimes the problem is obvious, other times it takes me a while to realize what is happening and causing the problem. But in all cases it’s the same problem - my TMPDIR environment variable points to a directory that doesn't exist. That's because for historical reasons (mostly related to HP-UX, bad permissions and global tmp directories) I've always set TMPDIR to a directory within my home directory. It's just a one of those things I've had in …

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business.

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level. …

This week aside from tons of different tasks I was working on one of MMM users complaint regarding some issues with MMM on Solaris 10. I knew that this OS has not so user (admin) friendly environment (especially for people with strong GNU-related background), but had no other options and decided to install Solaris 10 in VMWare Fusion on my desktop.

Installation was a bit strange comparing to Debian/RHEL/Ubuntu and FreeBSD where I have a strong experience, but I’ve managed to install it successfully. The major problem after my first boot was a lack of knowledge about how things could be done in Solaris… Below I’ll describe what generic Linux admin could do with Solaris to make it easier to use and more friendly for GNU-addicted mind

Notice: If you’re …

The great Internet is littered with some really useful MySQL-related articles, that I think you’ll enjoy reading just as much as I did.

• I’ve not given Google Gears too much of a look yet, but its definitely interesting and the tutorials at O’Reilly’s ONLamp site help one play with it: The Power of Google Gears (Part 1) and The Power of Google Gears (Part 2). Looks like the series is complete, and Part 2 concentrates on using Gears for offline data entry, then syncing it with a MySQL server once the application is online. Looks like the future of desktop software might end up being like this…
• While browsing a magazine store, I picked up the SysAdmin magazine that was months …

During JavaOne this year Rags and I did a hands on lab on DTrace. The topic was "Using DTrace on Java and other Web 2.0 Languages in Solaris". Due to some unforeseen reason the lab was scheduled from 8:45 PM to 10:45 PM (Yes PM) and that to on the day of the big party at JavaOne. So I was expecting to be speaking to an empty room but lo and behold we had close to 100 engineers ( a few pretty drunk) and most stayed until the finished the lab.It was pretty heartening and was worth all the efforts that went into …

New alpha release 1.0-pre4 of the MySQL Master-Master Replication Manager. This release has lots of major fixes and I’m glad to announce first sponsored port of mmm to non-linux platform - it has been ported to Solaris 10. So, here are our changes in this version:

• Real checks timeouts - I’ve found and fixed lots of problems in checks timeout code and now if you specified in your mmm_mon.conf, that some check should timeout in 5 sec, it would timeout correctly on all supported platforms.
• External third-party tools using - On all supported non-linux platforms mmm will use system binaries for fping and arp_ping so porting to another platforms would be much easier.
• Agent …