You are Invited !
The New England Open Solaris User Group (NEOSUG) Meeting

Topic for this meeting:  Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Performance, Observability and Debugging
(The Abridged Version)

Please RSVP at : https://www.suneventreg.com//cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2337

What:        New England OpenSolaris User Group Meeting (NEOSUG)
When:        July 24,2008  6:30-9:30 pm (registration opens @5:30)
Where:     Sun Microsystems Campus
1 Network Circle
Burlington, MA

Who should attend? : UNIX Developers, Solaris users, System Managers and System Administrators:

AGENDA:

5:30-6:30:      Registration, Refreshments
6:30-6:40:      Introductions, Peter Galvin
6:40-8:30:      Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Performance, Jim Mauro, Sun Microsystems
8:30-9:00:      Questions and Discussion

TALK DESCRIPTIONS:

Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Performance, Observability and Debugging
(The Abridged Version)

The observability toolbox in Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris is loaded with
powerful tools and utilities for analyzing applications and the underlying
system. Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), allows you to connect the dots
between the process and thread-centric tools, and the system utilization
tools, and get a complete picture on what your applications are doing, how they
are interacting with the kernel, and to what extent they are consuming
hardware resources (CPU, Mem, etc).

This two hour talk walks through the tools, utilities and methods for
analyzing workloads on your Solaris systems.

NEOSUG BIOs:

Peter Galvin : Chief Technologist, Corporate Technologies Inc.
Peter Baer Galvin is the Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., a systems integrator and VAR, and was the Systems Manager for Brown University’s Computer Science Department. He has written articles for Byte and other magazines. He wrote the Pete’s Wicked World and Pete’s Super Systems columns at SunWorld Magazine. He is currently contributing editor for SysAdmin Magazine, where he managed the Solaris Corner. Peter is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts texbooks.
Blog: http://pbgalvin.wordpress.com <http://pbgalvin.wordpress.com/>

Jim Mauro: Principle Engineer in the Systems Group,  Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Jim Mauro works on improving delivered application performance on Sun hardware and Solaris. Jim’s recent project work includes Solaris
performance as a guest operating system on Xen and VMware virtual machines, Solaris large memory page performance, and Solaris performance on large SPARC systems. Jim co-authored Solaris Internals (1st Ed, Oct 2000), Solaris Internals (2nd Ed, June  2006)
and Solaris Performance and Tools (1st Ed, June 2006).

Picked up my first iphone on Friday. My friend Mark and I avoided lines by calling ahead to check status and wait time at a few stores, and arriving at the store late afternoon. In Hingham, MA, we waited only a couple of minutes before having a sales rep help us to our new phones.

Many great things to appreciate about the phone, especially the screen and the (many, mostly) great applications. Some things people complain about I find to be very nice. The camera quality seems to be very good, but maybe as the lens gets some wear and tear the quality will decrease.

Fun applications so far include evernote (my new favorite journaling software), sketches, save benjis, vicinity, weatherbug, google, bloomberg, pcalc, and the built in GPS.  And the UI is tremendous.

But battery life is a problem.  To start, I turned everything on - bluetooth, wifi, 3G, and push email from exchange. This is the way I’d prefer to run so I figured I should give it a try. About 5 hours later, with fairly light phone use, the battery was dead.  Turned off Wifi and (unscientifically) battery life wasn’t much better. Then 3G, and again battery seemed to be draining quickly. Then found a web site talking about how “push” email is a big battery drainer. Tried resetting that to “pull” mode - i.e. the phone will connect periodically to the email (calendar, contact) servers and download changes, rather than getting the changes as they happen. If that greatly increases battery life I’ll try turning on the other services and see if I can get closes to connectivity nirvana or if I’ll have to run lean and mean.  I’ll report back with the results.

The LISA (large installation systems administration) conference of USENIX has released its 2008 call for papers. I have a vested interest in spreading the word because I’m on the program committee and wants lots of (good) papers to read and select from.  LISA is a high-quality, refereed paper conference. The theme for LISA ‘08 is “Real World System Administration.”

Have a look at the CFP and as appropriate please consider submitting a paper.

I’ll be teaching (again) for USENIX at their annual general conference in Boston, MA USA during the week of June 22nd. Registration just opened and all of the conference details can be found at the USENIX site. I’ll try to attend the conference as well as teach my two tutorials (Solaris 10 Administration Workshop and Solaris 10 Security Workshop), but sometimes other work projects get in the way. Hope to see you there!

My column has been published in ;login:. This month it’s about the Solaris Security Benchmark, which is a top-notch tool for checking and improving the security of your Solaris systems.  Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login: April 2008, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).

Since SysAdmin Magazine stopped publishing, I’ve been looking for a new place to write for. The USENIX association publishes a bi-monthly journal called ;login: for its members. In my view the contents there are always top-notch, so I was pleased when they invited me to write a column for them.

Feb 2008 marks the debut of “PATS” - Pete’s All Things Sun. (Cleverly, I managed to make the column name also the name of my favorite team :-).  ;login: is printed and shipped to members. USENIX also runs conferences and has other valuable member benefits, so if you are interested in all things Unix you should consider becoming a member.

;login: is also available on-line with some contents free but some members-only at ;login: . To make sure that everyone interested has access to my writings, I’ll post them here as well after they come out in ;login.

So without further ado, here is the first column, about my view of the “future of Sun”: ;login: Feb 2008 Galvin column

(For those interested in the NorthEast (US) Open Solaris Uses Group…)
Hi NEOSUG’ers!

Sorry for the lateness of this update, but now the holidays are over and it’s back to work.

Our November NEOSUG meeting featured two great talks:

Jeff Victor talked about the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant, which is a software technology that enables a Solaris 10 Container to behave like a Solaris 8 system. The slides from the talk are available here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ne-osug/files/S8MA-Customer.pdf

In its first public demonstrration (!), Dave Miner showed off Project Indiana, which is a new project to create an OpenSolaris binary distribution. Dave also handed out CDs containing this first preview distribution (version .75). Quite a few folks at the meeting used this liveCD to boot and test Indiana, while others (like me) installed it as a VMware guest to play with. Dave’s slide are available here: http://blogs.sun.com/dminer/entry/slides_from_indiana_at_neosug

Finally, this user group is actually for y’all, the users. Please take a minute to fill out this survey to tell us about logistics and topics for future NEOSUG meetings: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=KEoVVsviYk1cJD56XeWeaw_3d_3d

Also, if you have an interesting topic to talk about, and want to talk about it, please get in touch and we’ll try to include that in a future meeting.

Based on your surveys and feedback, we’ll start planning the next NEOSUG meeting.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

Just announced: the Fourth NEOSUG meeting. It will be on Nov 1 starting at 6:30 at the Sun campus in Burlington, MA. This month’s meeting has two great topics and some fun.

Talk 1: The Solaris 8 Migration Assistant is a software technology that enables a Solaris 10 Container to behave like a Solaris 8 system. Most applications that run on Solaris 8 will run in a Solaris 8 Container without recompilation or other modification. S8MA enables a consolidated platform to run both Solaris 10 and Solaris 8 applications, and both can benefit from the innovative features of Solaris 10. This session will describe and demonstrate the S8MA technology, and will discuss the types of situations for which S8MA is  an appropriate technology. Jeff Victor will present this talk.

Talk 2: Project Indiana. This meeting is scheduled to coincide with the first preview release of Indiana. Dave Miner, one of the leads on Indiana, will give a talk about the project and then we’ll have an “install fest” where NEOSUG attendees can try out this new distribution of Solaris. Dave will have live CDs to allow exploration without installation. We are also planning on having VMware images, so VMware-happy laptops are welcome as well.

The meeting should run until 9:30 or so. Snacks will be served. Hope to see you there!

Here are some useful links:
OpenSolaris Indiana project
NEOSUG discussion forum
NEOSUG homepage

Sun, rather quietly, has released Solaris 10 update 4. It’s available here. Note that it’s currently only available for download. Media kits are not yet available.

Hi, just updated The “Best” Mac OS Resources page again. This time incorporated a bunch of feedback and added some stuff I use but didn’t include the last time around.