Geek Style

I am moving all my Unix (mostly FreeBSD and Solaris) development efforts to a new website: www.uniXified.net. The site is already up and running as my test platform. The server is running FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE (obviously!) and TextPattern as CMS.

I am also hosting nightly snapshots of RoundCube webmail project on this new website, because RoundCube team is too lazy to release their software.

While I run Windows XP on my laptop, my friends know that I am a big big fan and advocate of FreeBSD, Sun Solaris and Apple Mac OS X. Keep these facts.

Beside my faith and believe in Sun, now I am afraid they are going the wrong way. In fact, Sun without Bill Joy is like Apple without Steve Jobs. People in sun are officially starting to act weird:

As you know, we recently unveiled Solaris 10, the world’s highest volume and most secure UNIX, running on all volume platforms - SPARC and both AMD and Intel x64. We’ve seen a huge rush of downloads (topping 1.5 million licenses) - and as you continue exploring the x64 platform as an alternative for your users, the opportunity to join forces on an operating system seems readily at hand.

So I’d like to personally invite you to adopt Solaris 10 as the underpinning of the next generation Mac. We both respect Unix, both respect innovation, and both clearly see volume opportunities in extending choice to developers. We’d love to work together.

from Jonathan Schwartz blog

I am afraid he’s not sure what he is talking about. Solaris is not mature enough for serious jobs on x86. And what would motivate apple to discard its own BSD-like licensed platform (which because of derivation from FreeBSD project, is already mature and stable on x86 platform) and switch to Solaris?

Maybe it was a free try to promote Solaris. But instead of chattering and issuing free advise to people, I’d suggest them to work on better products and realize the promises they’ve made about ZFS and their other unfinished projects.

If you are familiar with Solaris or Veritas VFS you probably know what is a filesystem snapshot. Its a very handful feature that not every filesystem supports.

When you want to make a backup from your partitions, it is recommended to take the disk offline by unmounting the disk or switching to single-user mode. This way you make sure that the filesystem doesn’t change during backup. But this is not always possible, especially on systems that are running mission critical applications. To solve this issue, some filesystems offer snapshot feature as a workaround. The same functionality was added to Solaris 8 and later releases, using fssnap utility.

In brief, a snapshot is a frozen image of an active partition that does not change when the content of physical disk changes. Its like a still picture that is taken from middle of a movie. But it does not actually stop your filesystem, and it does not require too much disk space to make an snapshot. Making an snapshot of an active partition is the best way to make a backup without taking your disk offline.

To find out how the FS snapshot works, I highly recommend reading this article from UnixReview.

The reason that you see so many Sun related posts in this weblog recently is that I am doing some SUN related jobs these days. And I’ve gained a lot of invaluable experiences with SunOS and stuff that I would like to share with you.

I have visited docs.sun.com several times but I haven’t dig into it accurately. There are plenty of useful documentation on Solaris is available here in both online and downloadable format.

The second good thing Stokley’s Unix SysAdm Resources, especially the SUN section.

And finally the SUN BigAdmin portal has many good Solaris related articles for SysAdmins.

Apart from my SUN related works, I am also reading “Postfix: The Definitive Guide” by Kyle D. Dent from O’reilly and Associates that is an excellent book and I really recommend it for Postfix lovers.

And another news for postfix lovers is that Wietse has released and updated set of documentation for upcomfing Postfix 2.1 software.