In Through The Out Door

One of the most interesting features in Solaris is its ZFS filesystem. Read on for a quick guide to ZFS administration.

[From Solving Common Administration Problems with ZFS]

Can the Linux community get over its “not invented here” ideology which has often hindered its ability to adopt technological improvements from outside sources? I keep saying myself, I hope so. But recent events have shown me that we have a long way to go until we become a culture of [...]

Sun platform strategist Ian Murdock presented OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live. The platform looks promising, but serious advantages of adopting it on the desktop remain elusive.
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[From Sun touts big plans for OpenSolaris as first release nears]

No royalties to pay in interop deal?
The Samba team has reached an agreement with Microsoft, with the software giant agreeing to disclose technical and legal information to the software libre project. Samba is by far the most widely-used software stack that allows non-Microsoft computer to talk to Windows machines, and use proprietary Microsoft network services.…
[From [...]

Mac OS X Leopard is now officially Unix, according to the Opengroup.” I know everyone out there was really worried about this one. Welcome to the August news vacuum!

Report Warns Against Well-Meaning Net Censorship:A report entitled ‘Governing the Internet,’ was issued Thursday by the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The document, which highlights the increasing environment of internet ‘policing’ around the world, characterized the practice as ‘a bitter reminder of the ease with which some regimes — democracies and dictatorships alike — seek to suppress speech that they disapprove of, dislike, or simply fear.’ From the article: ‘The OSCE report says Kazakhstan’s efforts to rein in Internet journalism in the name of national security is reminiscent of Soviet-era “spy mania,” and it says Georgian law contains numerous provisions curbing freedom of expression online. Web sites, blogs and personal pages all are subject to criminal as well as civil prosecution in Kazakhstan, and the country’s information minister, Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, has vowed to purge Kazakh sites of “dirt” and “lies.”

SSH Overview:Nice article about ssh.”SSH (secure shell) is a program enabling secure access to remote file systems. Not everyone is aware of other powerful SSH capabilities, such as passwordless login, automatic execution of commands on a remote system or even mounting a remote folder using SSH! In this article we’ll cover these features and much more.”

Sun Says File Systems are Important Differentiator:Sun Microsystems was originally known as a workstation vendor, and it became best known as a maker of servers and their associated Solaris Unix operating system…. Sun still believes that file systems matter, and its Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and the expanding role it could play in the IT industry are proof of this belief. Given the features inside ZFS, it comes as no surprise that Sun is excited to see other companies and open source projects pick it up. According to Jeff Bonwick, who is a co-creator of ZFS with Moore and the storage chief technology officer at Sun, the open source FreeBSD variant of BSD Unix already supports ZFS in its distro and the NetBSD is adding ZFS support through Google’s Summer of Code effort, whereby Google pays young nerds to do coding for a summer job. The future “Leopard” version of MacOS X Server also has ZFS support inside of its beta versions, but it remains to be seen if the file system will make it into the final release of Apple’s server operating system.

A peek at Sun’s new Streaming System:80,000 simultaneous 4Mbps streams, or 160,000 2Mbps streams; the technology and implementation of Sun’s Streaming System.Read More…

Sun Is Giving Away Solaris 10 DVDs:“For a limited time only, just like Ubuntu’s ShipIt service, Sun Microsystems lets you order Solaris 10 absolutely free of charge. The operating system comes on a single DVD supporting both the x86 and SPARC versions. Also included is Sun Studio 11.”

ZFS Overview from Sun:Here’s a PDF overview of ZFS by Jeff Bonwick of Sun Microsystems. The 128-bit ZFS file system will apparently be used in Leopard to provide multi-disk data pools as well as to create data snapshots for backups. ZFS provides fast data access with lots of data integrity features. It’s a nice, easy-to-follow overview that’s well worth a look if you have any interesting in learning more about ZFS.

Securing NFS - Tunneling NFS over SSH (27 Sep 2006):The goal of this howto is building an NFS server that works on an SSH tunnel. This way all traffic between your hosts and the file server is encrypted and thus more secure. Normally you should enter a password every time you try to establish an SSH connection but since we could be mounting at bootup we will use ssh-keygen to create a keypair so we can login without entering a password. We will, however, limit that login session to executing just one command.

Infocus: Analyzing malicious SSH login attempts:Malicious SSH login attempts have been appearing in some administrators’ logs for several years. This article revisits the use of honeypots to analyze malicious SSH login attempts and see what can be learned about this activity. The article then offers recommendations on how to secure one’s system against these attacks.

UNIX productivity tips in an office setting:The language of the UNIX command line is notoriously versatile: With a panorama of small tools and utilities and a shell to combine and execute them, you can specify many precise and complex tasks. Learn how to use techniques unique to UNIX in an office setting, which become a powerful ally toward increasing your productivity.

In June of last year, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code.

Why ZFS for home:I think a lot of us manage the stuff at work very differently that we manage our personal machines. And this is not a good thing.“ZFS scales from one drive to an infinite number of drives and has benefits for all of them.Let’s take a look at the average home computer a single drive holding a mix of files, up to 3GB drives are common. That is a lot of data to lose and its getting easier lose data these days. Further more new hard drives aren’t getting any more reliable with time.

Time Warner Cable 30Mbps:But only in developments in San Antonio. Time Warner Cable is offering 30Mbps Cable tiers to some upscale apartment dwellers in San Antonio. In that market, the company will offer 10 Mbps service to Xtreme users for $69.95 a month, 15 Mbps service for $129.95 a month, and its 30 Mbps servi..

CLI Magic: ifup, ifdown, ifstatus:I’ve always assumed that ifup and ifdown were conditional commands that performed their assigned duties only if the interface device in question was up or down, as the command might be. I was dead wrong.

How To Look Like A UNIX Guru:Nice little overview of some of the basics of Unix.“If you want to be a serious server developer, you will need to have a certain facility with a number of UNIX tools; about 15. You will start to see similarities among them, particularly regular expressions, and soon you will feel very comfortable. Combining the simple commands, you can build very powerful tools very quickly–much faster than you could build the equivalent functionality in C or Java, for example.”

Sun’s Schwartz talks about licensing Solaris under the GPL3:Sun continues its dance with open source as it contemplates changing the license under which the Solaris source code is released. Is Sun finally serious about working with the open source community?