Last week, while at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas I mentioned in one of the roundtables about how wicked-cool it would be to have a desktop client for Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu Developer Week and other online tuition events that we run. One of the challenges we face every time we run these events is [...]

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Just an update on the acquisition front... Oracle gets more time to respond to EC antitrust concerns. "The deadline for a final ruling has been put back to Jan. 27 from Jan. 19, which amounts to six additional working days for Oracle to win over the skeptical regulator."

It's become crystal clear, for those not following the issue, that this is really all about MySQL. As I and others have sited repeatedly, the de facto standard MySQL engine for enterprise deployments is InnoDB which is already owned by Oracle, which really puts a big dent in the argument. All this makes you wonder, would Oracle have still acquired Sun if they didn't own MySQL? I tend to think, yes. Which makes that deal seem all the more ridiculous. All the same, Sun paid $1B for it, so the suggestion that Oracle should just let that entity break back off is even more ridiculous, not to mention just bad business.

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Nevada Build 128 (snv_128) is now closed and available as BFU or source tarball. This means that those who want to play with ZFS Dedup but don't want to build from source can give it a go.

It should be said that there have been a lot of exciting enhancements to Nevada over the last couple of builds. Here are some of the changes in the last couple builds:

• ZFS Dedup
• zpool recovery support
• More ZFS fixes and improvements than you can shake a stick at
• Solaris now has bridging, and RBridges (IETF TRILL)
• Crossbow now provides link-protection (IP Anti-Spoof); this was a Joyent request we're glad to see incorporated
• Flowadm now implements remote_port attribute (was in the man page since the beginning but only added in 126)
• ksh93 update 2
• Solaris Hotplug Framework
• Smartcard support was ripped out
• ILB: Integrated L3/L4 Load balancer ... yes, thats right, a L3/L4 Load Balancer integrated INTO the Solaris kernel! This is my play toy atm.
• iSCSI Boot
• Piles and piles of COMSTAR and FCOE enhancements
• FMA for Nehalem_EX
• Solaris 10 zones
• Fast Crash Dump
• Lots of Audio improvements
• Clearview IP Tunneling (ie: create IP tunnels via dladm and associate resource controls like any other link)
• Datalink Administration from Non-Global Zones
• Solaris Packet Capture
• Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet Driver
• ... and on and on and on.

If your not running at least Build 121 your really behind the times, and I highly recommend that if you have the time to install SX:CE 127 and BFU up to 128... or, if your busy with the holidays, make sure you set aside some time in December to really dig into the new hotness when SX:CE 128 releases.

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Monday was a holiday here in Japan so I went to the O`Reilly Make Conference and saw some of my Tokyo Hackerspace friends there -- among thousands of other Japanese Makers. Really good time.

Make Magazine

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On a couple of our servers running Solaris we noticed that it usually takes more than 10s to login. Once in everything is a snap. I quickly investigated it and this turned out to be interesting. I used truss(1M) to investigate what's going on from the moment I connect to the moment I have a working shell.

# truss -f -o /tmp/a -v all -adDE -p 408

Now I logged in to the system and analyzed /tmp/a file. First I confirmed that it took over 10s to login. From the moment the connection was accepted to the moment I got interactive session it took about 11s as shown below:

[...]
408:     2.6594  0.0007  0.0000 fcntl(4, F_SETFL, (no flags))                   = 0
[...]
12186:  14.0814  0.0001  0.0000 write(4, " | : { b7F S LB7A2  BA13".., 64)      = 64
12196:  read(0, 0x080473DF, 1)          (sleeping...)
[...]

So I checked when it started to go wrong.

[...]
408:     2.6594  0.0007  0.0000 fcntl(4, F_SETFL, (no flags))                   = 0
[...]
12196:   3.7245  0.0003  0.0003 forkx(0)                                        = 12200

The connection started just before the fcntl showed above and everything is executing quick up-to forkx() at 3.7245s. So far it took a little more than 1s. What happens next seems to be a loop of hundreds of entries like:

[...]
12200:   4.5521  0.0000  0.0000 ioctl(3, ZFS_IOC_USERSPACE_ONE, 0x08046790)     Err#48 ENOTSUP
12200:   4.5522  0.0001  0.0000 ioctl(7, MNTIOC_GETMNTENT, 0x08047C1C)          = 0
12200:   4.5917  0.0395  0.0002 ioctl(3, ZFS_IOC_OBJSET_STATS, 0x08046390)      = 0
12200:   4.5918  0.0001  0.0000 getuid()                                        = 35148 [35148]
12200:   4.5919  0.0001  0.0000 getuid()                                        = 35148 [35148]
12200:   4.5919  0.0000  0.0000 door_info(6, 0x08046460)                        = 0
12200:          target=189 proc=0x806FCD0 data=0xDEADBEED
12200:          attributes=DOOR_UNREF|DOOR_NO_CANCEL
12200:          uniquifier=289
12200:   4.5922  0.0003  0.0000 door_call(6, 0x080464D0)                        = 0
12200:          data_ptr=FE430000 data_size=232
12200:          desc_ptr=0x0 desc_num=0
12200:          rbuf=0xFE430000 rsize=16384
12200:   4.5923  0.0001  0.0000 ioctl(3, ZFS_IOC_USERSPACE_ONE, 0x08046790)     Err#48 ENOTSUP
12200:   4.5923  0.0000  0.0000 ioctl(7, MNTIOC_GETMNTENT, 0x08047C1C)          = 0
12200:   4.6095  0.0172  0.0001 ioctl(3, ZFS_IOC_OBJSET_STATS, 0x08046390)      = 0
12200:   4.6096  0.0001  0.0000 getuid()                                        = 35148 [35148]
12200:   4.6096  0.0000  0.0000 getuid()                                        = 35148 [35148]
12200:   4.6097  0.0001  0.0000 door_info(6, 0x08046460)                        = 0
12200:          target=189 proc=0x806FCD0 data=0xDEADBEED
12200:          attributes=DOOR_UNREF|DOOR_NO_CANCEL
12200:          uniquifier=289
12200:   4.6098  0.0001  0.0000 door_call(6, 0x080464D0)                        = 0
12200:          data_ptr=FE430000 data_size=232
12200:          desc_ptr=0x0 desc_num=0
12200:          rbuf=0xFE430000 rsize=16384
12200:   4.6098  0.0000  0.0000 ioctl(3, ZFS_IOC_USERSPACE_ONE, 0x08046790)     Err#48 ENOTSUP
12200:   4.6099  0.0001  0.0000 ioctl(7, MNTIOC_GETMNTENT, 0x08047C1C)          = 0
12200:   4.6201  0.0102  0.0001 ioctl(3, ZFS_IOC_OBJSET_STATS, 0x08046390)      = 0
12200:   4.6202  0.0001  0.0000 getuid()                                        = 35148 [35148]
12200:   4.6203  0.0001  0.0000 getuid()                                        = 35148 [35148]
[...]

The process with PID 12200 was:

12200:   3.8229  0.0947  0.0013 execve("/usr/sbin/quota", 0x0811F9E8, 0x0811D008)  argc = 1
12200:      *** SUID: ruid/euid/suid = 35148 / 0 / 0  ***
12200:   argv: /usr/sbin/quota

By visually looking at couple of pages of these ioctls it looked like most of the total time would be spent in doing ioctl(3, ZFS_IOC_OBJSET_STATS, 0x08046390). Lets check it:

# grep "^12200:" /tmp/a |grep ioctl|grep ZFS_IOC_OBJSET_STATS|awk 'BEGIN{i=0}{i=i+$3}END{print i}'
9.7412

So out of 11s above ioctls along took 9. To have a clear picture lets check how much time the quota command took:

# grep "^12200:" /tmp/a |head -1
12200:   3.7245  3.7245  0.0000 forkx()         (returning as child ...)        = 12196
# grep "^12200:" /tmp/a |tail -1
12200:  13.9854  0.0003  0.0000 _exit(0)

So it took about 10s which means almost 100% of its time was spent doing above ioctls.
There are almost 300 zfs filesystems on this particular server so it all adds up. Sometimes quota completes very quickly sometimes it takes many seconds - I guess depending if requested data from all these zfs filesystems is cached or not. You need to run quota as a non-root user otherwise most checks are skipped and it is always quick.
Since we are not using quota on these systems anyway I commented out quota check in /etc/profile and now a full login takes about 1s on average which is 10-12x improvement.

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The GNOME Women edition of GNOME Journal has been released, including an article by yours truly on Telepathy and MC5. Check it out.



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Somehow the wind finally leads me to Bandung, the place where I spent years studying at ITB. While still trying to absorb all the deja-vu sensations (last time I was here, when I left the place, was 6 years ago!), nothing beats having breakfast (and potentially also lunch and dinner later on) in one of those food stalls. Since I promised to write about my culinary excitement, here is one to pollute the planets (the aggregated blogs, not our blue marble): Kupat Tahu. Essentially it is fried tofu, bean sprouts, and lontong (compressed rice) served with peanut sauce and some crackers. That makes it for a good breakfast.

I will be in Bandung today and tomorrow, mostly just around the university. If you are around and want to have a chat, feel free to drop me an email!

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Some street shots from Jakarta and Bandung last week ...



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After spending Tuesday talking with hundreds of engineering students at ITHB Bandung (and after a great lunch with the university faculty), we found a very cool Bandung OpenSolaris User Group meeting at detikinet.com, which is Indonesia`s largest news portal (meeting references here and here). The gathering was held in a dimly lit driveway under a tent. For over two hours we sat on the floor on a carpet and just talked about building developer communities using OpenSolaris.

I didn`t present any slides, so we just had a free-flowing conversation. It was a warm night and the rains (read: utterly massive downpours) had stopped, so everything was nice and relaxed and quiet. I tried to stress that it`s important to build community locally first (this way you can follow your own rules) but then to connect globally so you learn from others around the world. The second point I made was that there is no secret to establishing credibility in a community. It`s a simple concept, really. Contributing. That`s it. In fact, there is no other way. Your title does not matter. Nor does your age or political associations or position in any given organization. And you geography should`t matter, either. What matters most is your ability to get involved, to organize and engage new people, to build basic infrastructure and tools to facilitate participation, and then to contribute directly yourself. That`s how you build community -- and the building concept pervades all levels of a community. Everyone builds. And everyone builds from within the community, not from the outside. I also told a bunch of stories about the engineers, managers, and community developers I have met along the way, the ones I respect most and from who I still learn every day. Excellent night. Then the next morning some of guys took me to a nearby volcano.

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I missed something I wanted to go to yesterday, because I opted to wait for the bus that was coming in 5 minutes, and thus be early, rather than walk and only just make it on time.

The bus companies in Melbourne seem quite small, they only run a couple of lines each. Most shifts seem to be a driving the same line back and forth. The problem is when there is a delay on a route, driving the same route back and forth leads to that delay stacking and stacking. A technique I've seen to combat this is having buses change routes at the end of every route, effectively driving in circles around the area. This hopefully gives them an opportunity to make up the lost time. Of course, it requires bus routes that terminate in the same place and bus companies that operate more than just a couple of routes.

For what it's worth, a lot of yesterday's angst could probably have been avoided if the City of Yarra had bothered to tell someone it was closing part of Johnston St. Simply adjusting the traffic light sequences for the detour would have been a huge win, instead of having a traffic light that gave you but 15 seconds to turn down the next road, backing traffic up for 15 minutes.

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On Tuesday we went to ITHB in Bandung, which is about two hours from Jakarta, for another university visit. We were a bit late due to some impressive winter rain, but when we arrived the energy in the room was palpable. Great fun. Loved every minute. Can`t wait to go back. More presos on OpenSolaris from Harry Kaligis, Agus Setiawan, Lukman Prihandika, Rachmat Febrianto, Alex Budiyanto. And me. 

Blog tag: indonesia-09 | Photos on Flickr | Presentation | Search for Indonesia OSUGs

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Role models aren't something we have few of; sad that perhaps the most recent one comes from a beer commercial:

I mean, come on... his advice on careers "Find what you don't do well.... and don't do that thing." Classic!

Need something more expansive? Learn Chinese! If you find it difficult, try to learn Japanesse... and then you'll go back and appreciate how much easier Chinese languages are.

Not intellectual enough? Need to stretch those brain cells a bit more? Then, I ask, what is justice? As a Christian I have all those answers, laid down thousands of years ago, but since apparently folks like to re-invent the wheel (something King Solomon explained to us about 1,000 BC... "There is nothing new under the sun"), try Harvard's Michael Sandel discussion on Justice. A fun and engaging discussion in one of Harvard's beautiful facilities, exploring the "Moral Side of Murder". Its an enjoyable metal excersize and well expressed.

If your reading this post on an aggregator or via RSS and don't see the embedded video, just come here to cuddletech to see it properly.

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Xen 3.4 integrated yesterday. It should appear in snv_129.

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I was in Indonesia earlier this week for some OpenSolaris university and user group events. Really cool trip. Exhausting, too. I did a lot of talking. Much more than usual. The community there is engaged and thriving, so there was a lot of talking in between the talks, too. Everyone was super friendly and quite obviously talented. It was my first trip to Indonesia, and it moved me deeply. I will go back, no question about it. I really liked it there. And I learned a lot. I shot 500 images and saved about 200, so I`ll post them across a few entries over the next few days. Indonesia should make for an interesting future for OpenSolaris in South East Asia with these guys coming along. Trust me on that one.

On Monday we started the day at Gunadarma University in Depok, which is about an hour outside Jakarta. Presenting at the event were Harry Kaligis, Alex Budiyanto, Made Wiryana, Agus Setiawan, and Rachmat Febrianto. And me. I talked about the history of OpenSolaris, some of the open development and website projects to support contributions, and how we are building a development community around the world. The other guys talked about local programs and specific technologies in the OpenSolaris distribution. After all the talks and questions/answers, we met with the school faculty to discuss how OpenSolaris can be used to help students learn software development, and we also stressed the importance of building an engineering community on campus where students can contribute both locally and globally.

Blog tag: indonesia-09 | Photos on Flickr | Presentation | Search for Indonesia OSUGs

Special thanks to Alex Budiyanto for driving everything. Alex is an amazing community organizer (and presenter too). More to come.

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It turns out that PlanetPlanet starts to ignore you if you make four blog posts in quick succession, so in case you missed it yesterday:

• status update on Clutter-GTK
• Useful python trick of the day: dict.get()
• Why Telepathy is not like libpurple

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