What a sucky two weeks!

First, Ele brings home a bug. Nothing big for her--she's better in two days--but it lays me out. It doesn't seem too bad, just a weight in my lungs, but my head is full of wool, I'm dizzy, and I sleep for some 16+ hours a day. :-(

That all starts on the 22nd. On the 26th, I wake up to find the server running, but completely unresponsive. First of several hard power-downs. Over two days, I find several seeming problems, and order two new hard drives.

I'm not entirely convinced the drives have failed. They sound and feel fine spinning up. But the system isn't happy with them. It's also very unhappy with the two drives in the external USB enclosures. Any activity there freezes the system after several minutes. (More Big Red Switch activity.)

So, are the two drives actually dead? I don't know. I don't really have anything to test them in. What about the USB ports or enclosures? Again, I don't have a spare test system. Maybe I can use the Ubuntu laptop a friend gave me for that...

So I spent several days shuffling drives and attaching/detaching drives from ZFS pools and letting the mirrors re-silver. I was able, through cascading bigger drives down, to eliminate the smallest mirror (where the first drive seemed to fail anyway) and still gain HDD space. The elimination of the one zpool means no more USB drives hanging off the server as well.

The system has been running fine for about two days now. The hard shutdowns did break some software, but it doesn't seem to affect anything but itself. (My root mirror is still UFS.) My server is older than I thought, though. The USB ports are still 1.2. I seriously need to look at upgrading the hardware.

As for the OS, that needs updating as well. But, I can't do that until Solaris 11 comes out. The Solaris 11 Express license has a specific clause saying not only that it is only for development and testing, but also that it is strictly a single-user license. No good for someone supporting two people on Sun Rays. sigh

I really don't like Ellison. We OpenSolaris people have really been tossed out in the cold by him. Oracle continues to bleed Sun people as well, making me think that many "inside the wall" aren't happy with the new directions either. And it isn't just (Open)Solaris. Java. Open Office. Ellison is throwing his weight around like a big bad-tempered gorilla.

I'm really hoping the Illumos project will save the day, at least for us OS folks.

But for now, my server is running again. Time to look at making a few core services more redundant.

Rainer

Well, I'm a little frustrated by Oracle's new licensing terms for Solaris. There is a new clause in the developer license that states it can only be used for no other purpose than to develop and test your application.

I have no issues with paying for a regular license. I've done this before, for a few years, before Sun kicked off the OpenSolaris project. But, Oracle only lists high-end commercial pricing on their website. As a home user, I cannot afford a $1000 license.

In somewhat related news, the new "Document Foundation" has announced the LibreOffice project. Their "demands" are extremely unreasonable and unrealistic, but the move demonstrates the same dissatisfaction with Oracle expressed by the OpenSolaris board this past summer. While some feel Sun may have been too open, Oracle is tighter on information than MI6. Normally, that would be fine for a company. What Larry Ellison forgets, though (or ignores), is that by buying Sun he has taken on leadership of two open source communities. These operate much differently than a tight-lipped company, or not at all. Oracle has seen similar criticism about their use of and tweaks to Linux.

Larry does not play well with others.

So after ages of waiting for an update to OpenSolaris, I have to wait yet another few months. Then, I'll have to see how I can get the latest Sun Ray Server bits. As a home user, I'm not too hopeful.

sigh

Rainer

Wow, I've been hopping.

Mark Brundege and I are still trying to figure out why why my tool chain is not creating proper PDF files out of the Sun XML source. Alan has dropped a new Docs consolidation, so I've started testing with that. Unfortunately, most of the XML isn't the problem. Mark has done amazing work finding and fixing bugs in the SolBookTrans tool during all of this. Some of this is a moving target--nobody told us the doc writers had updated the Solbook versions during the past couple of months.