Bones of an Idol(2)

As we sift through the bones of an idol

We dig for the bones of an idol

When the will is gone

'Cause something keeps turning us on

"Bones of an Idol", The New Pornographers

Today was Solaris 10 Administration, an all-day course that introduced all the nifty features of Solaris 10. I've only worked with Solaris since July, but I've been reading so much about Solaris 10 that most of the stuff presented (dtrace, SMF, zones) was familiar to me. OTOH, the course was aimed at admins of older versions of Solaris (2.veryearly through 8 and 9), and so the explanation of the differences assumed a lot more familiarity with Solaris than I had. It was a curious sensation.

Still, though, it was worth going to. Good quote: "Oracle DBAs are the most Kool-Aid drinking people I've ever met." And another: "Zones are the most controversial thing we'll be talking about today, and spending the most time on. I saw someone carrying two cups of coffee -- that's the right attitude." Also, Bill Lefebvre, the man I was going to accuse of stealing my underwear, wrote top(1).

Oh, and it's a good thing I brought a second wireless network card; the onboard one in the laptop kept dying, with an entry in syslog that read "fatal firmware error". Now I've got an Orinoco Gold in here, and it's working just fine.

Met a sysadmin today who works in the VOIP department of a phone company; they've moved most of their stuff from racks and racks of old-style Alcatel equipment to one rack of Solaris machines acting as soft switches. I was curious about the difference in reliability and uptime; my understanding is that the demands on telecom equipment are worlds above anything that can be provided by COTS Unix, and asked him how it worked for them.

He said that, yes, you'd get situations where a phone call would be delayed because of a system crash: instead of taking one second to connect, it might take two or even three. And if that was anything beyond a small fraction of their customers, that would be a big problem. However, the soft switches had much better failover ability than the old stuff; the old stuff would be up much longer, but when it failed everything would cascade and the whole system would come tumbling down, at which point a customer would hear "Your call cannot be completed as dialed."

Met another guy who was very excited about ZFS, because of an app at his work that writes 4 TB of data in individual 4 KB files. The best they've heard from their current storage vendor of choice is a block size of 8 KB...which means doubling their storage requirements just to deal with filesystem overhead.

I had alligator jumbalaya. It's official: it tastes like salty chicken.