linux

While setting up some developers with remote SmartSVN via X over SSH using Plink, I ran into the following error:

Xlib: PuTTY X11 proxy: wrong authentication protocol attempted

SmartSVN couldn't connect to the tunneled X server display. I was extremely confused since I'd been using X tunneling successfully with SecureCRT. After googling the error message a little bit, it seems that the part about the "wrong authentication protocol attempted" is misleading.

November 24, 2009

UPDATE: No ZFS Support for Replication Manager in the near future

Using storage level snapshots can be used to run backups without directly requiring resources from the original host.

EMC Replication Manager coordinates the creation of application consistent snapshots across all the hosts in your network. It handles scheduling creation/expiration of snapshots,  mounting and unmounting from backup servers, etc. from a single console.

Although it is not tightly integrated into EMC Networker like the similar Networker PowerSnap module, it can be used to start a backup process after taking a new snapshot and it has the capability to manage snapshots unrelated to backups from a GUI.

While the data sheet claims support for Solaris, there are several caveats which I have run into.

November 16, 2009

When discussing availability of a service, it is common to hear the term "Five Nines" referring to a service being available 99.999% of the time but "Five Nines" are relative. If your time frame is a week, then your service can be unavailable for 6.05 seconds whereas a time frame of a year, allows for a very respectable 5.26 minutes.

In reality, none of those calculations are relevant because no one cares if a service is unavailable for 10 hours, as long as they aren't trying to use it. On the other hand, if you're handling 50,000 transactions per second, 6.05 seconds of unavailability could cost you 302,500 transactions and no one cares if you met your SLA.

This problem is one I've come up against a number of times in the past and recently even more and the issue is orders of magnitude in IT. The larger the volume of business you handle, the less relevant the Five Nines become.

November 04, 2009

I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.

I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.

Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???

October 25, 2009

I am a huge fan of Sun Microsystems. I love Solaris 10. I love ZFS. I love RBAC. I love zones. I really love T2/T2+ processors. I especially love the T5140 and X4450 servers.

One thing I cannot figure out though, is why Sun lets obviously delirious cocaine addicts package their software. Maybe I'm exaggerating but I think that many will agree that Sun's packages leave much to be desired in general. On top of that, Sun seems to have a constant need to move software around and invent new paths- to boldy go where no sysadmin has gone before????

April 21, 2009