Download and gunzip in one step

I was feeling the need to take a look at Nexenta and decided that I wasn't terribly interested in waiting for a download, then waiting for a gunzip. Why not do them both at the same time?

$ wget -O /dev/stdout  http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/genunix.org/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz  | gunzip > elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso         => `/dev/stdout'
--20:21:47--  http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/genunix.org/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz
Resolving www.gnusolaris.org... 216.129.112.21
Connecting to www.gnusolaris.org|216.129.112.21|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.genunix.org/distributions/gnusolaris/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz [following]
--20:21:48--  http://www.genunix.org/distributions/gnusolaris/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz
Resolving www.genunix.org... 204.152.191.100
Connecting to www.genunix.org|204.152.191.100|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 567,433,011 (541M) [text/plain]

13% [====>                                ] 77,025,880   359.25K/s    ETA 22:27

Just 22 minutes to go. I guess at this rate I could have piped it through cdrecord with "speed=2".

T: Nexenta OpenSolaris

patch_order made easy

Some of my most tedious times as a Solaris administrator have been when I needed to create a patch_order file for a custom patch cluster. For a long time I have intended to just write a script...

But now, I don't have to do that any longer! Today I discovered that smpatch(1M) now has an order subcommand. This makes it really quite simple for me to create a patch_order file for a very long list of patches. In this example, I create the patch_order file for the patches in the Solaris 10 Update 1 UpgradePatches directory:

# cd /mnt/Solaris_10/UpgradePatches
# ls > /tmp/patches
# smpatch order -d `pwd` -x idlist=/tmp/patches > /tmp/patch_order

Now, if you want to go the full length and create a patch cluster for it:

# mkdir /tmp/10U1_UpgradePatches
# cd /tmp/10U1_UpgradePatches
# mv /tmp/patch_order .
# ln -s /mnt/Solaris_10/UpgradePatches/* .
# cp /somewhere/10_Recommended/install_cluster .

Modify the SUPPLEMENT_NAME="..." line in install_cluster to be more descriptive for this patch cluster. Be sure to not use characters like /, \, |, etc.

# cd /tmp
# zip -rq 10U1_UpgradePatches.zip 10U1_UpgradePatches

At this point, you can copy the 10U1_UpgradePatches around to your various machines and use it just like you would a 10_Recommended bundle. Enjoy!

I am sad to report that the world is running short of geeks. I think it was the 1200 baud modem in my 386sx system that I smoked will building Linux 0.99pl14 that solidified my position in the 90's.

My first SUPerG

I had the privilige of attending SUPerG this week. Some of the highlights of the presentations come in the form of short quotes from some of the speakers.

Volume managers are shims that were introduced to work around bugs that should have been fixed in the file system. - Richard McDougall

And finally, someone of authority that has said what I have been trying to get across for a couple years:

IO Wait == Idle - Glenn Fawcett

Overall I was surprised by the amount of emphasis that Sun has put on the future of storage. With the combination of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FireEngine, and NFSv4, Sun very clearly stated that the future of storage is in NAS. The story is pretty well outlined by Richard McDougall in this blog entry. I was happy to see that the first Niagara systems seem to be ahead of schedule. Within the next 8 months I should be able to get a single processor SPARC box that is more powerful than a 12-processor 4800 or any commodity box sporting chips from Intel or AMD. Way cool. The thing with silicon that really blew me away was Rock's hardware scout. This chip is able to look a thousand or more instructions ahead to optimize cache loads. The net effect is that you can get by with a lot less cache, thereby making huge caches unnecessary. And for those of us that are a couple years into the life of 15k's, the good news keeps coming. First, the upgrade to UltraSPARC IV boards brings about 90% performance improvement, the UltraSPARC IV+ will add another 70%. With an expected July release of the US IV+, this means that through periodic system board (and carrier plate...) upgrades, the 15k (and 4800, 6800, 12k, etc.) are keeping pace with Moore's Law without a forklift upgrade. Very impressive. There was also a lot of talk about various Solaris 10 features... however, things like zones, dtrace, zfs, etc. have been covered consistently for a long time in the press and in many data centers that there was not a whole lot new to say. Putting all of the improvements in Solaris together with advances in other technologies (10 gigabit ethernet, multiple vendors with NFSv4, CMT, ...) really shows that there is a bright future for Solaris.