OK, I admit that headline is a bit misleading, but it’s also true.  I spend time regularly working in an environment that is all Solaris UNIX running on SPARC chips, therefore we use SPARC based Sun Blade workstations exclusively.  This means that the platform we use to manage and develop on is the same as the platform we manage, which is a good thing when you are dealing with hundreds of mission critical servers.

I was speaking to one of my Sun contacts, enquiring about some workstations when I was informed that Sun has now dropped all Sun Blade workstations based on the SPARC chip.  You will only be able to buy workstations with Intel or AMD (x86) processors.

What!?  I personally think that’s stupid, and it puts me in a bind.  Before you flame, I know why they did it.  The SPARC workstations are expensive and I am sure they don’t sell very many so they decided it was more economical to stop making them altogether.  And yes, I know I can run Solaris x86, but why would I want to introduce a whole new architecture just for managing my existing systems?

Either way you slice this, I think it is a sign of the times.  Quality and performance will give way to cheap.  I read articles on the Web about how solaris is slow and the SPARC chip “sucks” because it “only” goes up to 1.5GHz or so when Intel goes over 3Ghz.  That just makes me smile because it just shows how little people know about how things work.

When you get right down to it, I guess it all comes down to money.

Good news, there is a new article up in the Library!  I  have posted a Solaris reference that covers lots of common basic tasks that new system administrators look to do, and us old system administrators lookup to remember how to do!  I’ll be adding more and revising as time goes on, so check it out and see what you think.  Enjoy!

Sun Microsystems is a great company anyway, they make outstanding hardware and deliver a rock solid operating system. Add to that all of the stuff they open source to the public and it just gets better. Now they have announced that their latest chip, the T2 or Niagra 2 has also been open sourced. This means that anyone can get the code, plans, schematics, etc. and make their own … for free. Think about that for a second. Let’s say you are a device maker, some mobile gadget, and you need a CPU to work with. Would you rather use something like the T2, which is unmatched in capabilities for free? Or pay a few million for an Itanium chip? Yeah, me too. I’ll take the Sun chip and run before they change their mind. They have opened other chips too, like the T1, and software like Java and Solaris. Good stuff as far as I am concerned.

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Ok, here is a quick tip that has come in handy quite a few times in my days writing shell scripts, for example in bash. Let’s say, for whatever reason, you need to chop off the end of a string (like a variable). Chopping the beginning is easy, just use the cut command, but in order to chop the end you have to know how long the string is so you can tell it where to start. In this example, we are going to us the wc command to figure out how long the string is, and then subtract 1 to cut the last character. You can subtract however many you want depending on how many characters you want to cut. Check it out … Read the rest of this entry »

Holy Virtualization batman, it looks like Sun Microsystems is improving it’s containers sub system and will now allow users to run unmodified Red Hat and CentOS linux under a Solaris container or zone!  That’s awesome!  I have already become a huge fan of Solaris containers, and now with it being able to support Linux, that’s a great boost to an already wonderful technology.  Check out the article at Solaris Central.  In case anyone missed it, I posted a script a while back for creating zones in Solaris 10.  I’ll have to modify it (if need be) when the latest version comes out to support Linux.  Enjoy!

Have you ever needed to create a file of a specific size? Not where the contents are anything specific, but you just need a file that is whatever size so you can test disk I/O or network transfer speed or whatever it is you want to test. For whatever reason, I have found it very handy to be able to create these test files when needed, so I thought I would pass along some tips to that end. Here are some ways you can accomplish this with Solaris and Linux.

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