I know it’s Windows NT (yes, we’re still using that for a couple of things … trying to get off it) but I still have to laugh that these programmers spelled their employer’s name wrong:
Monthly Archives: March 2006
I’ve recently been getting into voice-over-IP telephony, both due to my dayjob (where I’m now responsible for managing a very expensive but full-featured Cisco VoIP System) and my long-time desire to build a hobbyist PBX at home using Asterisk. I’d set up Asterisk under a FreeBSD 5.4 server some months ago, but got as far as installing a demo dialplan before I got distracted. This time around I decided to give Asterisk@Home a spin, because it bundles many common Asterisk add-ons and features into an easy-to-install ISO backed by CentOS 4.x. (For those who don’t know what CentOS is, it’s basically a straight recompile of RedHat’s popular Enterprise Linux product, and as such, available for free.) Continue reading…
I’ve been “on the Internet” (a term which, by the way, makes no sense) for about twelve or thirteen years now, and although this makes me a young ‘un from the perspective of those folks who invented TCP/IP, I still remember enough of the days before the World Wide Web to have some nostalgia for the way the Internet used to be. I bring this up because I just came across a little notebook in which I used to write down relevant URIs and other ephemera. Some of the gems in there:
- a listing of my favourite Archie servers
- directions for accessing the e-mail anonymizer that used to live at
anon@anon.penet.fi - my old FidoNet e-mail address (
julian.dunn@f11.n241.z1.fidonet.org) - logon information for my various FreeNet accounts such as the now-defunct Cleveland FreeNet
- a listing of Gopher servers upon which one would have found current price quotes for Macintoshes
- various sundry BBS telephone numbers that I’m sure are all out of service by now
- information on how to get to my Dad’s VAX account via Datapac (anyone know if Bell Canada is still operating Datapac these days?)
I was surprised to not only find that I’d written down information for accessing the Internet Oracle (a/k/a rec.humour.oracle) but that the Oracle is still going strong.
Anyone else have old Internet memories they’d like to contribute?
I promised to follow up on the last article about Solaris Logical Volume Manager with one about setting up Solaris zones, so here it is.
For those of you not in the know, Solaris zones (or containers; the terms are used interchangeably) is Sun’s virtualization technology, similar to Microsoft Virtual Server or VMWare‘s products. However, the “guests” (or “non-global zones” in Solaris-speak) must also be Solaris, and effectively run the identical base system as the “host” (or “global zone”). This is quite similar to the way FreeBSD’s jails work.
Sun is pushing the zone technology very hard these days, due to virtualization technology being the hot topic in IT at the moment. Solaris Zones do have some interesting advantages over even FreeBSD jails, namely:
- patches applied in global zone are automatically applied to the non-global zones (for the most part), easing maintenance;
- ability to share the pkgdb from the global zone to the non-global zones;
- ability to easily loopback-mount global zone filesystems from within non-global zones;
- ability to do some resource control (CPU shares only) upon the non-global zones
I predict that Sun engineers are working very hard on adding more knobs to the last item, so that you’ll eventually be able to control how much swap, RAM, etc. that the non-global zones are using.
(I’m still writing my article on setting up zones under Solaris 10. Bear with me while I assemble all the relevant details)
I just got hit by this bug:
Transition patching (-t option) is not supported in a zones environment.
Basically, you can’t patch a system with non-global zones installed without manually hacking an rc script! As the last comment in the thread says, “Hmm, the thing that most concerns me is that a bug that obvious should have been found in even the most cursory testing.”
