I updated to OpenSolaris Build 101b Release Candidate 2 earlier tonight. Easy.



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You've seen the code. Now watch the video.

Albert White has put together a blog entry today about OpenSolaris Code Swarms.

There is a great video, which is a graphical representation of the development over time of the Image Packaging System, (which I started checking packaging changes into a couple of months ago). I just love how large scale changes are represented (such as the integration of a new WOS build with many new or changed packages).

Image Packaging System Code Swarm from Albert White on Vimeo.

(Thanks Alan).

[Technorati Tag: IPS]

[Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris]

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Teresa just posted the announcement I've been hinting at for weeks (hinting because we didn't have any specifics but it's never been a secret). So, we are going to start shipping a serious amount of new starter kits to the OpenSolaris User Groups. This is the second round of kits to be sent to the OSUGs this year, so we are trying to do this more consistently now. Basically, we are looking to help new OSUGs get going, and we are also hoping we can help increase activity a bit as well. The OSUGs are independent, but this is just a Sun contribution to the effort. That's pretty much it. If you lead an OSUG, go check out Teresa's mail.

Join an OSUG here. Propose a new OSUG here.

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There will be two CommunityOne conferences next year. One in San Francisco and one in New York. Excellent. I'm going to try to get to at least one of these events. I'm from New York originally, so I'd like to get back there for a visit if I can. We'll see. In the meantime, if you want to get involved, check out the link below.

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I've been working on building better and better ZFS replication tools for use at Joyent, but it often gets complex and frustrating because, although replication in ZFS is very simplistic, managing all the snapshots, retentions, and mountains of error checking and handling, on top of reporting and stats collection, is a nightmare.

So, just to relax I wrote a fun simple replication tool I call "Zynk". It's retardedly simple (read: elegant) and fun. As the comment says, if something breaks, its a pita to clean up, but otherwise should work well when set in motion. The intention is to run from cron every 30-600 seconds or so, but be aware that you should do the first run manually, because thats gonna take some time... the incrementals afterwards should be able to run in less than whatever frequency via cron you set.

#!/bin/bash
## ZYNK: The Zuper Zimple ZFS Sync (Replication) Tool
## Form: zynk local/dataset root@remote.host destination/dataset

# Please note: The reason this is so simple is because there is no error checking, reporting, or cleanup.
#               In the event that something goes wonkey, you'll manually need to fix the snapshots and
#               modify or remote the /var/run/zynk datafile which contains the most recent snapshot name.
# Furthermore, this absolutely relies on the GNU version of 'date' in order to get epoch time
# Before using, make sure you've distributed your SSH key to the remote host and can ssh without password.


if [ ! $3 ] 
then
        echo "Usage: zynk local/dataset root@remote.host destination/dataset"
        echo "WARNING: The destination is the full path for the remote dataset, not the prefix dataset stub."
        exit
fi


DATE=`date +%s`
if [ $DATE == "%s" ]
then
        echo "Must use GNU Date, please install and modify script."
        exit
fi


if [ -e /var/run/zynk ] 
then
        # Datafile is found, creating incr.
        echo "Incremental started at `date`"
        zfs snapshot ${1}@${DATE}
        zfs send  -i  ${1}@`cat /var/run/zynk` ${1}@${DATE} | ssh ${2} zfs recv -F ${3}
        zfs destroy ${1}@`cat /var/run/zynk`
        ssh ${2} zfs destroy ${3}@`cat /var/run/zynk`
        echo ${DATE} > /var/run/zynk
        echo "Incremental complete at `date`"
else 
        # Datafile not found, creating full.
        echo "Full started at `date`"
        zfs snapshot ${1}@${DATE}
        zfs send     ${1}@${DATE} | ssh ${2} zfs recv ${3}
        echo ${DATE} > /var/run/zynk
        echo "Full completed at `date`"
fi

Here it is in action:

root@quadra ~$ rm /var/run/zynk 
root@quadra ~$ ./zynk data/home/tamr root@localhost backup/zynk/tamr
Full started at Mon Nov 17 13:44:28 PST 2008
Full completed at Mon Nov 17 13:44:28 PST 2008

root@quadra ~$ ./zynk data/home/tamr root@localhost backup/zynk/tamr
Incremental started at Mon Nov 17 13:44:58 PST 2008
Incremental complete at Mon Nov 17 13:44:58 PST 2008

root@quadra ~$ ./zynk data/home/tamr root@localhost backup/zynk/tamr
Incremental started at Mon Nov 17 13:45:01 PST 2008
Incremental complete at Mon Nov 17 13:45:02 PST 2008

root@quadra ~$ ./zynk data/home/tamr root@localhost backup/zynk/tamr
Incremental started at Mon Nov 17 13:45:19 PST 2008
Incremental complete at Mon Nov 17 13:45:20 PST 2008

root@quadra ~$ zfs list -r data/home/tamr backup/zynk/tamr 
NAME                          USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
backup/zynk/tamr             2.45M   296G  2.45M  /backup/zynk/tamr
backup/zynk/tamr@1226958319      0      -  2.45M  -
data/home/tamr               2.47M   196M  2.45M  /data/home/tamr
data/home/tamr@1226958319        0      -  2.45M  -

Whats important to note is that it only maintains a single snapshot on either source or destination, so you don't consume a bunch of additional space or have to worry about screwing up quotas.

This isn't intended so much as a "real" tool, but something you can play around with and hopefully excite the mind about some new fun applications. Add error checking, add retention, add reporting, re-implement in a new language. Have fun. :)

For a thorough discussion of ZFS Replication, see my post from a couple weeks ago: Understanding ZFS: Replication, Archive and Backup.

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Shaoting and I spent the day at the Fuzhou Software Park today. Great day. We hope to get a new OpenSolaris User Group started at this facility. The Fuzhou Software Park is one of approximately 50 such parks in China. This one is home to Fuzhou University, 300 software and IT companies, and tens of thousands of students and developers. It's big.



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I'm spending a lot of time in China lately, and I plan to spend more if I can. So, business cards are on the way. I can see that I'm going to have to learn some Chinese along the way. It's not like I have my hands full trying to learn Japanese, but what can I say. It's just another language. No big deal, right? Right. Also, Wei Liu, wrote my name in Chinese for me. Pretty cool, eh?

??



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Yesterday I attended the ACM/ICPC Programming Competition in Hefei with Shao-Ting, Chengzu Zhou (Ricky), and Edgar Liu. Very impressive event. There were hundreds of Chinese students working in teams solving problem sets written in English while programming using NetBeans running on OpenSolaris. Absolutely outrageous. I had a ball. Loved every minute of it. Here are some shots:

Sun China is the technical sponsor for the regional China ACM events, which includes five live contests as well as a series of online pre-qualification sessions. In total, more than 15,000 Chinese students participate and touch OpenSolaris and NetBeans. That's very cool.

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Yesterday Shao-Ting and I stopped by Hefei University of Technology to meet with some professors and students about starting an OpenSolaris User Group. We also met with Wei Liu, Sun's Campus Ambassador at at the university. Really great day hanging out with these guys. Shaoting and Wei talked about the OpenSolaris distribution, and I talked about some ideas to start a user group.

More images from Shaoting here.

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I put the draft Constitution on the Genunix wiki the other day, and I added a bunch of updates as well. After a few weeks of list conversations, we'll now move to working on the wiki. What becomes of this draft will be voted on in the March 2009 election. Much work still to do. Feedback welcome.


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This should have been a simple task, but it took longer than I expected. Perhaps somebody can show me a quicker, better way to do this.

I've been connecting to the #pkg5 IRC channel on freenode.net for the last few days, and today I went to see what other channels were there. I'm using pidgin 2.5.1 on OpenSolaris 2008.11 (build 101a).

I knew enough about IRC to type /list in the input area at the bottom of my conversation(s) window. When I do that, up comes a popup dialog with a room list. I can click on the column headers to sort it in various ways. Neat. How to I save the information, so I can process it? Darned if I know. I furtled around in various menus and preference dialogs, couldn't find anything useful and gave up.

I then installed XChat 2.8.6. Under the Server menu, there is a List of Channels... menu item which brings up another popup dialog of the Channels List. Again, you can sort in various ways, but there is also a Save List... button. Yay!

I now have a text file containing a full channel list, sorted by the number of users, and from this I can extract useful URL's provided as part of the various channel descriptions.

[Technorati Tag: IRC]

[Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris]

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All day today while the West Coast of the U.S. has been sleeping, I've been reading articles in the media about Sun's new open storage appliances -- the Sun Storage 7110, 7210, and 7410. The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the tech media all had articles on these new systems. But the Forbes piece grabbed me right in the first paragraph: "Give Sun Microsystems credit: The roof may be on fire, but the beleaguered server vendor seems just as focused on putting out innovative products as putting out the flames." Nice bit. But my first reaction was, "well, what did you expect?" Ok, times are tough, but we sure as hell aren't curling up in a little ball and going away, right? I like the attitude of this launch. I like the focus on innovation and the determination to build something new. I like the buzz in the blogs. That's what you should expect.

Anyway, Bryan has the entire story with links to the whole team, so I'll just point there so you can start with Fishworks engineering. I know this project has been going for some time, and the entire team deserves a massive congratulations. Enjoy the day!


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I'm hoping to open a new list for the leaders of the OpenSolaris User Groups. The OSUG community is the largest group on the site, and we expect significant growth in the upcoming year -- especially because of OpenSolaris 2008.11. So, we need to start thinking about getting OSUG leaders on a common list so we can share ideas among groups around the world. Also, we have some resources to build new OSUG kits, and we want to get that stuff out to everyone soon. And finally, as we update the opensolaris.org website, we'll have to migrate the OSUGs to their own Group equal in status to Communities and Projects, so there will be a need to communicate frequently with the user group leads. So, that's my pitch.


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As release time nears, there will probably be a lot of reviews out in the press. Cool. It will be interesting to see how that goes. In the meantime, I found this article today on Enterprise Networking Planet from Charlie Schluting -- Time to Take OpenSolaris Seriously?


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I updated to OpenSolaris build 101a yesterday during the TLUG meeting at Sun. I had just enough battery to do it while I was walking around taking pictures and talking to everyone. So far so good with this build. I couldn't update from 99 to 100, though, so I filed a bug and finally did a fresh install (which went fine). Anyway, if you look at Dave Miner's blog you will see that they are calling build 101a "release candidate" so that means things are getting close. It's November, after all. This is hardly a secret. I don't know what any of the release dates are, but you can follow opensolaris-announce and indiana-discuss for more info. Give this version of OpenSolaris spin and report bugs.

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