Sun Storage Blogs

: Blog migration

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 02:05:38 +0000

More than a year ago, I migrated my blog to its new home:

And I'm very happy to see that the new incarnation has more RSS subscribers and daily visitors than this old one, and it's growing nicely. Thank you!

Still, there are a lot of people that visit this blog, probably by finding an old article through a search engine or so. And there are still hundreds of subscribers to the old RSS feed. Again, thank you, but you may be missing something!

So here's a short reminder:

Please check out my new blog Constant Thinking now. I'm putting a lot of effort and energy into it to make is as useful and interesting to you as possible. Of course, your feedback is very welcome!
If you like it, stay in touch by adding the new RSS feed to your feed reader.
If you don't like/use/know RSS, or if you want an extra look behind the scenes, there's a brand new option now: The Constant Thinking Newsletter will send you timely updates about new articles, plus some extra stuff like background information, more tips and the occasional inner circle type goodie. Sign up now!

Meanwhile, this blog will still remain for reference and archival purposes.

Thanks,

Constantin

: Six Weeks of Constant Thinking

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:26:21 +0000

As you know, I've moved this blog into an independent webspace and relaunched it as "Constant Thinking" about six weeks ago. Check it out, it's at constantin.glez.de. Here's a short "status report" after about 6 weeks of independent blogging:

One of my goals for my new blog is to achieve 500 RSS subscribers by summer (Yes, you're invited, too :)). You see, as a blogger, my lifebread is the number of people who regularly read my blog. That's how we bloggers feel rewarded for what we do: Every single RSS subscriber, every comment, every piece of feedback is like a pat on our shoulder, a drop of endorphine in our blood, a carrot... Well, you get the picture. Little things please little minds :).

In this case, my old blog has about 550 subscribers and I want you all to show up on my new blog as well. No, I won't just redirect the feed, that would feel like cheating and I'd never know if I deserved all those subscribers for my new blog or not (after all, you might just follow this blog just because it's a Sun blog, not because of is content).

So first of all, a big "Thank You!" to the more than 160 people who chose to follow my new blog's RSS feed. This is greatly appreciated!

To the other 390 or so, here's what you've probably been missing:

My new blog is based on Drupal. I learned a lot while setting it up, and so there's one article about Blogging platforms and why I chose Drupal plus another one about "How To Get Drupal To Work Through Strato's SSL Reverse Proxy". I plan to write more Drupal related articles as I tweak the installation more and more. For example, I still need to set up a tag cloud, an archive and probably a nicer looking theme. You know, these things never are quite finished.
OpenSolaris and Home Servers continue to be among my favourite themes for writing articles and so there's one on "Home Server: RAID-GREED and Why Mirroring is Still Best" and another on "Seven Useful OpenSolaris ZFS Home Server Tips", two of the most popular entries.
Ebook technologies (Readers, formats, publisher wars) are a new hobby of mine and so there's a piece on "Ebook Thoughts: What Are Ebooks And What Are They Not?" and just so you ebook reader doesn't feel empty, another one on "3 Cool Science Fiction Thrillers to Prepare You for the Future (Plus a Bonus One)". I'm carrying some more thoughts in my head that need to be written down, so stay tuned...
Finally, as an SE working for an IT company, I occasionally write about job matters. For example, I have a tutorial for you on "How To Properly Cut An Image From A PDF Into Your Presentation Or Blog" and even some career advice: "How to Add Creativity to Your Technology Career and Save Yourself from Automation and Outsourcing"

I hope you'll find these articles interesting and useful. Feel free to get more Technology Thoughts and add "Constant Thinking" to your RSS reader. I'm looking forward to your comments and feedback!

: A New Home For My Blog

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:35:17 +0000

First of all, a big "Thank You!" to you, my dear readers and the more than 500 subscribers (according to Feedburner) to this blog!

After having blogged here, on my Sun blog, for more than 5 years, I thought that the year 2010 is the right time to start running my own, independent blog. This is a thought that I've been having in my mind for a long time, and it is also something like the next logical step in developing myself as a blogger. Also, to me as a geek, it is a great excuse to play more deeply with some new blogging/CMS software.

New Year, New Blog

During the Christmas weeks (and before), I've been digging around different blogging systems and CMS and decided to use Drupal as my blogging platform, which is very powerful and flexible while offering endless possibilities to expand my blog in the future. It is hosted at Strato, which is a great Sun customer in Germany, and I'm happy to see that they use UltraSPARC T based systems to run my blog, too :).

So, without further ado, I encourage you to check out my new blog called: "Constant Thinking". You can reach it at constantin.glez.de or just type constantthinking.org into your browser. I'm looking forward to your feedback and suggestions: What do you like, what improvements do you suggest, what subjects do you want me to blog about?

Future Plans

I expect to continue writing about OpenSolaris, Technology, Home Servers, Podcasting, and some occasionaly useful diversions, like you're accustomed to. As a result of building my new blog, I've dug deeper into the Drupal Web Content Management System, so expect a few articles around that, too. Finally, I've also developed an interest in ebooks, readers and the EPUB format and I plan to share some experience around that as well in future blog articles.

Stay In Touch!

I hope you like the new concept and design and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to the new Constant Thinking RSS Feed, so we can stay in touch at least the next 5 years to come!

: OSDevCon 2009 Paper: Implementing a simple ZFS Auto-Scrub Service with SMF, RBAC, IPS and Visual Panels Integration - Lessons learned

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:15:28 +0000

A while ago, I wrote a little tool that helps you keep your ZFS pools clean by automatically running regular scrubs, similar to what the OpenSolaris auto-snapshot service does.

The lessons I learned during development of this service went into an OSDevCon 2009 paper that was presented in September 2009 in Dresden. It is a nice summary of things to keep in mind when developing SMF services of your own and it includes a tutorial on writing a GUI based on the OpenSolaris Visual Panels project.

Check out the Whitepaper here, the slides here, the SMF service here and if you want to take a peek at the Service's Visual Panels Java code, you'll find it here.

: Fun With DTrace: The Windows-Key Prank

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:32:14 +0000

The current episode of the German HELDENFunk podcast features an interview with Chris Gerhard about one of his favourite subjects: DTrace (in English, beginning at 14:58):

After the interview, we hear a guy called "Konteener Kalle" express his love (in German) for DTrace by playing a prank on his boss: Whenever he presses the Windows key (on an OpenSolaris system, mind you), he's punished by watching the XScreensaver BSOD hack (of course not knowing that it's just a screensaver).

That little joke challenged me to actually implement this prank. Here's how to do it.

The Idea

The idea of this prank is to start the XScreensaver Blue-Screen-of-Death screensaver (which simulates a Windows crash experience) on an OpenSolaris system whenever the user presses a certain key a certain number of times. This could be the Windows-Key (which doesn't have any real use on an OpenSolaris machine) or any other key. We count the number of key presses and only execute the BSOD after a certain number of key presses in order to make the prank less obvious.

Step 1: Identify the Windows (or any other) Key

If you have a Windows-Keyboard, this is easy: Run xev and press the Windows-Key. Take note of the keycode displayed in the xev output. Of course you can use any other key as well to play this prank. In this case, I'm using the left Control-Key, because I don't have a Windows-Key on the system I'm working on. The Control key has the keycode 37.

Step 2: Configure XScreensaver for BSOD

XScreensaver comes with a great collection of "hacks" that do interesting stuff on the screen when the screensaver activates. Check out the /usr/lib/xscreensaver/hacks directory. Each hack can be run individually, but then it will only execute inside a new window. For the BSOD illusion to be realistic, we want to execute the BSOD hack in full-screen.

This can be achieved by telling XScreensaver to demo the BSOD hack for us. It will then create a full-screen window and execute the BSOD hack inside the new window. The following command will tell XScreensaver to run a hack for us:

xscreensaver-command -demo <number>

The <number> part is a little complicated: XScreensaver looks at its config file ~/.xscreensaver where it stores a list of programs and arguments after the keyword "programs:". <number> simply refers to the number of the hack on that list. Therefore, we must create an entry in our admin user's .xscreensaver file that starts bsod(6) with the right parameters and that gives us a known number to call xscreensaver-command with.

Let's put our entry at the top of the list so we can simply use the number "1" to execute the BSOD screensaver. Somewhere in our .xscreensaver, the programs section should look like this:

  ...
  textFile:       /etc/motd
  textProgram:    date
  textURL:        http://blogs.sun.com/roller/rss

  programs:                                                                     \\
  -               "BSOD Windoze"  bsod -root -only nt         \\n\\
  -                "Qix (solid)"  qix -root -solid -segments 100              \\n\\
  -          "Qix (transparent)"  qix -root -count 4 -solid -transparent      \\n\\
  ...

You can test this by running xscreensaver-command -demo 1.

Step 3: Write a DTrace Script That Sets Up the Trap

Now it gets more interesting. How do we use DTrace to find out when a user presses a certain key? All we know is that the Xorg server processes the keystrokes for us. So let's start by watching Xorg in action. The following DTrace command will trace all function calls within Xorg:

pfexec dtrace -n pid`pgrep Xorg`:::entry'{ @func[probefunc] = count(); }'

Let's start it, press the desired key 10 times, then stop it with CTRL-C. You'll see a long list of Xorg functions, sorted by the number of times they've been called. Since we pressed the key 10 times, it's a good idea to look for functions that have been called ca. 10 times. And here, we seem to be lucky:

  ...
  miUnionO                                                          8
  DeviceFocusInEvents                                               9
  CommonAncestor                                                   10
  ComputeFreezes                                                   10
  CoreLeaveNotifies                                                10
  key_is_down                                                      11
  FreeScratchPixmapHeader                                          12
  GetScratchPixmapHeader                                           12
  LookupIDByType                                                   12
  ProcShmDispatch                                                  12
  ProcShmPutImage                                                  12
  ...

The key_is_down function looks like exactly the function we're looking for! In fact, some googling tells us that this function's 2nd argument is the keycode of the key that is down when the function is called.

Why do we see "11" and not "10" function calls to key_is_down? Because it also counted my pressing of the Ctrl-Key when I stopped the DTrace script through Ctrl-C :).

This gives us enough knowledge to create the following DTrace script:

  #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

  /\*
   \* BSODKey.d
   \*/

  /\*
   \* This D script will monitor a certain key in the system. When this key is
   \* pressed, a shell script will be executed that simulates a BSOD.
   \*
   \* The script needs the process id of the Xorg server to tap into as its
   \* first argument.
   \*
   \* One example of using this script is to punish a user pressing the
   \* Windows key on an OpenSolaris system by launching the BSOD screen saver.
   \*/

  #pragma D option quiet
  #pragma D option destructive

  BEGIN
  {
          ctrlcount = 0;
          keycode=37
  }

  pid$1::key_is_down:entry
  /arg1 == keycode/
  {
          ctrlcount ++;
  }

  pid$1::key_is_down:return
  /ctrlcount == 10/
  {
          ctrlcount = 0;
          system("/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -demo 1");
  }

First, we need to enable DTrace's destructive mode (ever heard of a "constructive prank"?) otherwise we can't call the system-command at the end. The script uses the pid provider to tap into Xorg. Therefore, we need to give it the PID of the Xorg server as an argument:

pfexec ./BSODKey.d `pgrep Xorg`

It then sets up a probe that fires whenever key_is_down is called with our keycode and counts the key presses. At the end of the key_is_down function call, it checks whether we reached 10 keypresses, then executes the BSOD screen saver and resets the counter. You may need to make sure that the DISPLAY variable is set correctly for the BSOD program to show up on the victim's screen when starting this script.

After hitting the Control-Key 10 times, we're rewarded with our beloved BSOD:

Conclusion

That wasn't too difficult, was it? Yes, one could have done the same thing by writing a regular script that taps into /dev/kbd or something similar. But the beauty of DTrace lies in the simplicity of this script (Tap into the right function while it's running) and in the fact that it now can be modified very easily to fire BSODs at any kind of event, including the user hitting a certain area of the screen with his mouse or selecting a particular text or whatever you choose it to be.

So, have fun with this script and let me know in the comments what kind of pranks (or helpful actions) you can imagine with DTrace!

: A Small and Energy-Efficient OpenSolaris Home Server

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:22:05 +0000

In an earlier entry, I outlined my most important requirements for an optimal OpenSolaris Home Server. It should:

Run OpenSolaris in order to fully leverage ZFS,
Support ECC memory, so data is protected at all times,
Be power-efficient, to help the environment and control costs,
Use a moderate amount of space and be quiet, for some extra WAF points.

So I went shopping and did some research on possible components. Here's what I came up with:

Choosing a Platform: AMD or Intel?

Disclosure: My wife works for AMD, so I may be slightly biased. But I think the following points are still very valid.

Intel is currently going through a significant change in architecture: The older Core 2 microarchitecture was based on the Front Side Bus (FSB), where the CPU connects to the Northbridge which contains the memory controller and connects to the memory, while also connecting to the Southbridge which connects to I/O.

Now, they are switching to the new Nehalem microarchitecture which has a memory-controller built into the CPU and a scalable I/O bus called Quickpath Interconnect that connects CPUs with other CPUs and/or IO.

Unfortunately, none of these architectures seem to support ECC memory at consumer level pricing. The cheapest Intel-based ECC-motherboard I could find had still more than double the cost of an AMD-based one. Even though the new Intel Core i7 series is based on Nehalem and thus could support ECC memory easily in theory, Intel somehow chose to not expose this feature. In addition, Core i7 CPUs are relatively new and there are not yet any power efficient versions available.

The Intel Atom processor series may be interesting for a home server from a pure power-saving perspective, but again, Atom motherboards don't support ECC and once your workload becomes a little more demanding (like transcoding or some heavier compiling), you'll miss the performance of a more powerful CPU.

AMD on the other hand has a number of attractive points for the home server builder:

AMD consumer CPUs use the same microarchitecture than their professional CPUs (currently, it's the K10 design). They only vary by number of cores, cache size, number of HT channels, TDP and frequency, which are all results of the manufacturing process. All other microarchitecture features are the same. When using an AMD consumer CPU, you essentially get a "smaller brother" of their high end CPUs.
This means you'll also get a built-in memory-controller that supports ECC.
This also means less chips to build a system (no Northbridge needed) and thus lower power-consumption.
AMD has been using the HyperTransport Interconnect for quite a while now. This is a fast, scaleable interconnect technology that has been on the market for quite a while so chipsets are widely available, proven and low-cost.

So it was no suprise that even low-cost AMD motherboards at EUR 60 or below are perfectly capable of supporting ECC memory which gives you an important server feature at economic cost.

My platform conclusion: Due to ECC support, low power consumption and good HyperTransport performance at low cost, AMD is an excellent platform for building a home server.

AMD Athlon II X2 240e: A Great Home Server CPU

While I was shopping around for AMD Athlon CPUs and just before I was about to decide for an AMD Athlon II X2 variant, AMD offered me one of their brand new AMD Athlon II X2 240e for testing, provided that I blogged about it. Thank you, AMD!

Introduced in October 20th, this CPU is part of the newest energy-efficient range of consumer CPUs from AMD. It has 2 cores (hence X2), snazzy 2.8 GHz and a 2 MB L2 cache. What's most important: The TDP for this CPU is only 45W, meaning that even under the highest stress, this CPU will never exceed 45W of power consumption. Including the memory controller. As you've guessed already, the "e" in the model number stands for "efficient".

There's an important trade-off to consider for home server CPUs: For instance, the AMD Phenom II series would have been more powerful because it has an additional L3 cache, but their TDP is at 65W minimum. While big caches (both with AMD and Intel) are good for compute-intensive operations and games, they can't help much in a home server context: Home servers spend most of their non-idle time transferring data from A to B (files, videos, music) and a cache doesn't help much here, cause it's just another stop between I/O and CPU to pass by. Transferred data hardly gets re-used.

Instead, for home servers, sacrificing the L3 cache for lower power consumption makes a lot of sense: You pay less for the CPU and you pay less for your power bill without sacrificing too much (if any) server relevant performance.

My CPU conclusion: For home servers, AMD Athlon II "e" series are perfect, because they save power and money and do the job very well. For games you might choose a more powerful Phenom II processor, which delivers better compute power at a slightly higher power bill.

Finding the Right Motherboard

After nailing the Platform and CPU question, I needed a motherboard. This can be a confusing process: For each CPU there are different chipsets, then there are different vendors offering motherboards based on these chipset, and then they offer different variants with different features. What should a good home server motherboard offer?

OpenSolaris support: Most motherboards "just work" with OpenSolaris, especially if they've been available for some time and/or use some well-known chipsets. To remove any doubts, consult the OpenSolaris Hardware Compatibility List.
ECC: Yes, AMD's ECC support is in the CPU, but just in case, we want to make sure that the motherboard exposes this feature to the user.
Integrated graphics: We only need a graphics card for installation, BIOS-settings/updates or debugging. The graphics shouldn't consume much power and doesn't need to deliver a lot of performance. Therefore, integrated graphics is just fine for a home server, and it saves some precious slot space, too.
Enough SATA ports: You need two ports for a mirrored root pool, another two for a mirrored data pool and then some more for hot-spare or if you want to spread your data pool across 4 or more disks. Many motherboards come with 6 SATA ports, which is ok.
Stability: If you have the choice between different variants, try to go for the "business" or "quality" version. It will likely have slightly better components and be better tuned towards 24/7 operation than the "performance", "gaming" or "overclocker" type boards which try to squeeze out more performance at the expense of durability.

Here's a very useful email thread on the OpenSolaris ZFS-discuss mailing list about CPU and motherboard options, pros and cons and user experiences. In this discussion, F.Wessels recommended the M3A78 series from Asus so I went for the M3A78-CM motherboard, which is their "business class" variant, priced at around 60 Euros and it has 6 SATA and 12(!) USB ports.

My motherboard conclusion: The Asus M3A78-CM motherboard has everything I need for a home server at a very low cost, and it's proven to run OpenSolaris just fine.

The Case: Antec NSK-1380

I won't go into much details about the case. My goal was to find one that can support at least 4 disks while being as compact as possible. The Antec NSK-1380 was the smallest case I could find that supports 4 disks. It comes with a built-in power supply, an extra fan, some features to help with keeping noise down and it looked ok for a PC case.

Miscellaneous Tips&Tricks

While putting everything together, I ran into some smaller issues here and there. Here's what I came up with to solve them:

CPU cooler: My CPU being a gift from AMD, it came without a cooler. I chose the Zalman CNPS 7000C AL-CU because it was the cheapest cooler that was less than 6cm high, which is a limit imposed by the case. Unfortunately, it collides with one of the 4 harddisk slots by a mere couple of millimeters, so I need to figure out how to best cut or bend the blades to make room for the disk without hurting the cooler too much. I'm not very familiar with PC CPU coolers, but I suspect that with 45W TDP one could even get away with a passive cooler. The Zalman came with a throttle circuit which I set to the minimum speed. This seems to be more than enough and it makes the system really silent, but I need some more thorough testing to confirm. Drop me a comment if you are familiar with passive cooling of 45W TDP CPUs.
Boot disks: We need something to boot our home server from, so boot disks are unavoidable. I say "disks", because they should always be mirrored. But other than providing a way of booting, they tend to get in the way, especially when space is a precious resource in a small case. Some people therefore boot from CF cards or other small flash media. This can be a nice solution, especially combined with an IDE-to-CF adapter, but consumer level flash media is either very slow (a typical OS install can take many hours!) or very expensive. While looking for alternatives, I found a nice solution: The Scythe Slot Rafter fits into an unused PCI slot (taking up the breadth of two) and provides space for mounting four 2.5" disks at just EUR 5. These disks are cheap, good enough and I had an unused one lying around anyway, so that was a perfect solution for me.
Extra NIC: The Asus M3A78-CM comes with a Realtek NIC and some people complained about driver issues with OpenSolaris. So I followed the advice on the aforementioned Email thread and bought an Intel NIC which is well supported, just in case.
USB boot: I couldn't get the M3A78-CM to boot from USB at all. I tried a USB stick and a USB disk and different boot settings in the BIOS to no avail. I gave up and built in a DVD-ROM drive from my old server just to install OpenSolaris, then built it out again. Jan Brosowski has the same motherboard and he found out that you need to update to the latest BIOS revision and use the USB port that's right below the Ethernet port for USB boot to work. YMMV :).

The Result

And now for the most important part: How much power does the system consume? I did some testing with one boot disk and 4GB of ECC RAM and measured about 45W idle. While stressing CPU cores, RAM and the disk with multiple instances of sysbench, I could not get the system to consume more than 80W. All in all, I'm very pleased with the numbers, which are about half of what my old system used to consume. I didn't do any detailed performance tests yet, but I can say that the system feels very responsive and compile runs just rush along the screen. CPU temperature won't go beyond the low 50Cs on a hot day, despite using the lowest fan speed, so cooling seems to work well, too.

I just started full 24/7 operation of my new home server this weekend, so I hope I'll have some more long-term experience about performance and stability in a few months. Meanwhile, I'm in the middle of configuring the system, installing some services and implementing a new way of managing my home server. But that's probably the topic of another blog post...

Do you agree with the home server conclusions I reached in this post? Or would you suggest alternatives? Do you have experiences to share with the mentioned components? Or do you have suggestions and tips on how to get the most out of them? Let me know by posting a comment here!

Many thanks go to Michael Schmid of AMD for sending me the AMD Athlon II X2 240e CPU.

: Gonzalez Goes GeekAndPoke: My First Co-Authored Webcomic

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:55:40 +0000

A while ago, I highlighted a few of my favourite web comics. Little did I know then, that today I was going to be part of one. Here's the story:

Yesterday, @moellus complained yet again about his eternal nemesis, the NT admin, by saying something like: "Damn, can't unfollow the NT admin because he doesn't twitter - here's why - that's the sh\*# he sends me!" (Original Tweet)

That reminded me of the famous insult by the late Douglas Adams from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", in which Arthur Dent says about the Vogons: "I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one..."

So I twittered back that "I wish you were on Twitter so I could unfollow you!" must be the new worst insult you can do in 2009 and asked Oliver whether that would make a nice Geek And Poke cartoon.

Today, I'm proud to be part of the "Geek And Poke"-uversum, here's the cartoon:

I guess, to be "GeekAndPoked" is the new "Slashdotted" :). Thanks, Oliver!

P.S.: @moellus: Actually, to a geek, in 2009, sending someone a box of Windows 7 is like the medieval slapping with a glove. Don't take it lightly and get your LART-whip ready!

: New OpenSolaris ZFS Home Server: Requirements

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:24:29 +0000

A few months ago, I decided it was time for a new home server. The old one (see picture) is now more than 3 years old (the hardware is 2 years older), so it was time to plan ahead for the inevitable hardware failure. Curiously enough, my old server started to refuse working with some of my external USB disks only a few weeks ago, which confirmed my need for a new system. This is the beginning of a series of blog articles around building a new OpenSolaris home server.

Home Server Goals

Let's go over some goals for a home server to help us decide on the hardware. IMHO, a good home server should:

Run OpenSolaris. This means I don't want an appliance because this is too limiting and I'd end up hacking it to make it run something it doesn't do by itself anyway. It should therfore use a real OS.
It also means I don't want to use Linux, because quite frankly the whole Linux landscape is too unstable, confused and de-focused (don't get me wrong: It's nice for experimentation and as a hobbyist-OS, but I want something more serious to guard my data).
Windows is out of the question because it delivers too little for too high a price.
I like BSD (and used to run NetBSD on my Amiga 4000 back then in the mid nineties), but it seems to be more oriented to some (albeit interesting) niches for my taste.
Right now I prefer OpenSolaris because it's rock-solid, clean, well-documented, well-designed and it has lots of advanced features that other OSes only dream of. Yes, I'd still write and do the same if I weren't a Sun employee.
Leverage ZFS. This should be a no-brainer, but I just wanted to point out that any system that is serious about its data should absolutely run ZFS because of the end-to-end-integrity. Period. And then there are many useful features such as compression, send/receive, snapshots, ease of administration, no fscks and much more. Oh, and I'm looking forward to leveraging encryption and de-duplication at home in the near future, too!
Use ECC Memory: What's the use of having end-to-end data integrity with ZFS if your data is corrupted before ZFS can create it's checksum? That's why you need ECC Memory. Simply put: Use ECC memory and kiss those unexpected, unexplicable system crashes and broken data surprises good bye.
Be Power Efficient: Think 1.5 Euros of electricity bill per Watt per Year for a system running 24/7. The difference between your typical gaming PC and a power-efficient home server can easily be 50W or more when idle, so you're looking at an extra 75 Euros and more of free cash if you just pick your components more carefully. Notice that I'm not saying "Low-Power". There are a lot of compromises when trying to reach absolute low-powerness. Like many optimization problems, squeezing the last few Watts out of your system means investing a lot of money and effort while sacrificing important features. So I want this system to be power-efficient, but without too many sacrifices.
Use a Moderate Amount of Space: While my home server sits in the basement, form doesn't matter. But I may move into a new apartment where networking to the basement is not an option. Then the server needs to be living-room capable and have a decent WAF. Which also brings us to:
Be quiet: A power-efficient server needs less cooling which helps with being quiet. Again, we don't want to stretch the limits of quietness at all costs, but we want to make sure we don't do any obvious mistakes here that sacrifice the living-room capabilities of the system

What's Next

In the next blog entry, we'll discuss a few processor and platform considerations and reveal a cool, yet powerful option that presented itself to me. Meanwhile, feel free to check out other home server resources, such as Simon Breden's blog, Matthias Pfuetzner's blog, Jan Brosowski's Blog (German) or one of the many home server discussions on the zfs-discuss mailing list.

What are your requirements for a good home server? What do you currently use at home to fulfill your home server needs? What would you add to the above list of home server requirements? Feel free to add a comment below!

: New OpenSolaris ZFS Auto-Scrub Service Helps You Keep Proper Pool Hygiene

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:25:34 +0000

One of the most important features of ZFS is the ability to detect data corruption through the use of end-to-end checksums. In redundant ZFS pools (pools that are either mirrored or use a variant of RAID-Z), this can be used to fix broken data blocks by using the redundancy of the pool to reconstruct the data. This is often called self-healing.

This mechanism works whenever ZFS accesses any data, because it will always verify the checksum after reading a block of data. Unfortunately, this does not work if you don't regularly look at your data: Bit rot happens and with every broken block that is not checked (and therefore not corrected), the probability increases that even the redundant copy will be affected by bit rot too, resulting in data corruption.

Therefore, zpool(1M) provides the useful scrub sub-command which will systematically go through each data block on the pool and verify its checksum. On redundant pools, it will automatically fix any broken blocks and make sure your data is healthy and clean.

It should now be clear that every system should regularly scrub their pools to take full advantage of the ZFS self-healing feature. But you know how it is: You set up your server and often those little things get overlooked and that cron(1M) job you wanted to set up for regular pool scrubbing fell off your radar etc.

Introducing the ZFS Auto-Scrub SMF Service

Here's a service that is easy to install and configure that will make sure all of your pools will be scrubbed at least once a month. Advanced users can set up individualized schedules per pool with different scrubbing periods. It is implemented as an SMF service which means it can be easily managed using svcadm(1M) and customized using svccfg(1M).

The service borrows heavily from Tim Foster's ZFS Auto-Snapshot Service. This is not just coding laziness, it also helps minimize bugs in common tasks (such as setting up periodic cron jobs) and provides better consistency across multiple similar services. Plus: Why invent the wheel twice?

Requirements

The ZFS Auto-Scrub service assumes it is running on OpenSolaris. It should run on any recent distribution of OpenSolaris without problems.

More specifically, it uses the -d switch of the GNU variant of date(1) to parse human-readable date values. Make sure that /usr/gnu/bin/date is available (which is the default in OpenSolaris).

Right now, this service does not work on Solaris 10 out of the box (unless you install GNU date in /usr/gnu/bin). A future version of this script will work around this issue to make it easily usable on Solaris 10 systems as well.

Download and Installation

You can download Version 0.5b of the ZFS Auto-Scrub Service here. The included README file explains everything you need to know to make it work:

After unpacking the archive, start the install script as a privileged user:

pfexec ./install.sh

The script will copy three SMF method scripts into /lib/svc/method, import three SMF manifests and start a service that creates a new Solaris role for managing the service's privileges while it is running. It also installs the OpenSolaris Visual Panels package and adds a simple GUI to manage this service.

After installation, you need to activate the service. This can be done easily with:

svcadm enable auto-scrub:monthly

or by running the GUI with:

vp zfs-auto-scrub

This will activate a pre-defined instance of the service that makes sure each of your pools is scrubbed at least once a month.

This is all you need to do to make sure all your pools are regularly scrubbed.

If your pools haven't been scrubbed before or if the time or their last scrub is unknown, the script will proceed and start scrubbing. Keep in mind that scrubbing consumes a significant amount of system resources, so if you feel that a currently running scrub slows your system too much, you can interrupt it by saying:

pfexec zpool scrub -s <pool name>

In this case, don't worry, you can always start a manual scrub at a more suitable time or wait until the service kicks in by itself during the next scheduled scrubbing period.

Should you want to get rid of this service, use:

pfexec ./install.sh -d

The script will then disable any instances of the service, remove the manifests from the SMF repository, delete the scripts from /lib/svc/method, remove the special role and the authorizations the service created and finally remove the GUI. Notice that it will not remove the OpenSolaris Visual Panels package in case you want to use it for other purposes. Should you want to get rid of this as well, you can do so by saying:

pkg uninstall OSOLvpanels

Advanced Use

You can create your own instances of this service for individual pools at specified intervals. Here's an example:

  constant@fridolin:~$ svccfg
  svc:> select auto-scrub
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub> add mypool-weekly
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub> select mypool-weekly
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub:mypool-weekly> addpg zfs application
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub:mypool-weekly> setprop zfs/pool-name=mypool
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub:mypool-weekly> setprop zfs/interval=days 
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub:mypool-weekly> setprop zfs/period=7
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub:mypool-weekly> setprop zfs/offset=0
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub:mypool-weekly> setprop zfs/verbose=false
  svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-scrub:mypool-weekly> end
  constant@fridolin:~$ svcadm enable auto-scrub:mypool-weekly

This example will create and activate a service instance that makes sure the pool "mypool" is scrubbed once a week.

Check out the zfs-auto-scrub.xml file to learn more about how these properties work.

Implementation Details

Here are some interesting aspects of this service that I came across while writing it:

The service comes with its own Solaris role zfsscrub under which the script runs. The role has just the authorizations and profiles necessary to carry out its job, following the Solaris Role-Based Access Control philosophy. It comes with its own SMF service that takes care of creating the role if necessary, then disables itself. This makes a future deployment of this service with pkg(1) easier, which does not allow any scripts to be started during installation, but does allow activation of newly installed SMF services.
While zpool(1M) status can show you the last time a pool has been scrubbed, this information is not stored persistently. Every time you reboot or export/import the pool, ZFS loses track of when the last scrub of this pool occurred. This has been filed as CR 6878281. Until that has been resolved, we need to take care of remembering the time of last scrub ourselves. This is done by introducing another SMF service that periodically checks the scrub status, then records the completion date/time of the scrub in a custom ZFS property called org.opensolaris.auto-scrub:lastscrub in the pool's root filesystem when finished. We call this service whenever a scrub is started and it deactivates itself once it's job is done.
As mentioned above, the GUI is based on the OpenSolaris Visual Panels project. Many thanks to the people on its discussion list to help me get going. More about creating a visual panels GUI in a future blog entry.

Lessons learned

It's funny how a very simple task like "Write an SMF service that takes care of regular zpool scrubbing" can develop into a moderately complex thing. It grew into three different services instead of one, each with their own scripts and SMF manifests. It required an extra RBAC role to make it more secure. I ran into some zpool(1M) limitations which I now feel are worthy of RFEs and working around them made the whole thing slightly more complex. Add an install and de-install script and some minor quirks like using GNU date(1) instead of the regular one to have a reliable parser for human-readable date strings, not to mention a GUI and you cover quite a lot of ground even with a service as seemingly simple as this.

But this is what made this project interesting to me: I learned a lot about RBAC and SMF (of course), some new scripting hacks from the existing ZFS Auto-Snapshot service, found a few minor bugs (in the ZFS Auto-Snapshot service) and RFEs, programmed some Java including the use of the NetBeans GUI builder and had some fun with scripting, finding solutions and making sure stuff is more or less cleanly implemented.

I'd like to encourage everyone to write their own SMF services for whatever tools they install or write for themselves. It helps you think your stuff through, make it easy to install and manage, and you get a better feel of how Solaris and its subsystems work. And you can have some fun too. The easiest way to get started is by looking at what others have done. You'll find a lot of SMF scripts in /lib/svc/method and you can extract the manifests of already installed services using svccfg export. Find an SMF service that is similar to the one you want to implement, check out how it works and start adapting it to your needs until your own service is alive and kicking.

If you happen to be in Dresden for OSDevCon 2009, check out my session on "Implementing a simple SMF Service: Lessons learned" where I'll share more of the details behind implementing this service including the Visual Panels part.

Edit (Sep. 21st) Changed the link to CR 6878281 to the externally visible OpenSolaris bug database version, added a link to the session details on OSDevCon.

Edit (Jun. 27th, 2011) As the Mediacast service was decommissioned, I have re-hosted the archive in my new blog and updated the download link. Since vpanels has changed a lot lately, the vpanels integration doesn't work any more, but the SMF service still does.

: How to Fix OpenSolaris Keyboard Irregularities with Virtual Box

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:24:32 +0000

Virtual Box is great: It allows you to install OS A on OS B for impressively large sets of A and B OSes and their permutations. Almost everything works smoothly and seamlessly between host and guest: Cut&Paste, File sharing, networking, USB pass-through, even seamless windows are supported.

But there's one little glitch that is still a little annoying, but apparently not annoying enough for someone else to have blogged about this before: Keyboard remapping on Mac OS X hosts.

The Problem

Simple problem: Macs are different than PCs (phew), but they have slightly different keyboard mappings (oops). Most notably, on my German keyboard, the "<" key at the bottom left on the Mac will yield "\^" on OpenSolaris and vice versa. Same thing goes for "@", which is Right-Alt-L on the Mac, but Right-Alt-Q on PCs. Similar difficulties are encountered if you try to create a "|" pipe symbol or angular/curved brackets ("[]" and "{}" respectively).

Pressing the Right Keys

Usually no big deal. Close your eyes and blindly type what you would type on a PC and that'll give you a good hint at where the right keystrokes are. That works because Virtual Box actually maps the physical locations of the keys between host and guest, but not what's painted on them. So, with a little practice, you should be fine. But what happens if you can't quite remember what that PC keyboard looked like?

Last Friday I had an hour or so left and the playfulness of the problem got the better of me, so I decided to see if this can be fixed the Unix way. It's actually quite easy.

Searching for a cure

There are some helpful hints on the net, most notably Petr Hruska's entry on "Switching Keyboard Layout in Solaris", but it only deals with internationalization issues. What if you have the keyboard nationalities right, but individual keys are still different as in the Mac/PC case? Here's a step-by-step guide to help you with any keyboard remapping problem, plus a bonus table for OpenSolaris on Macbook users to get you started:

Xmodmap to the rescue

We're going to use xmodmap(1) to remap the keys on our keyboard. Check out the man-page to familiarize yourself with how it works.
See the keystrokes as OpenSolaris sees them: Use xev(6) to find out what keycodes belong to the keys you want to correct.
Check out what OpenSolaris is thinking about your problematic keys, either by testing them in a terminal or by checking your version of the standard Sun USB keyboard layouts.
Before you start modifying the current keyboard mapping, get the currently active one by saying something like:
xmakemap > ~/.xmodmaprc.current
Caution: There seems to be a bug in xmakemap that corrupts some of the entires. So, please use this only for reference but do not feed this file back into xmodmap (see later) or you'll likely make your keyboard unusable (until this bug is resolved).
Start editing your own remapping script for xmodmap:
vi ~/.xmodmaprc

For each key you want to remap, copy it's keycode entry from the xmakemap output into your own remapping table and modify to taste. Be careful, some entries from xmakemap are broken, but you should be able to figure those out. Here's my current .xmodmaprc file as a reference:

!
! Set up keys for a MacBook Pro running OpenSolaris on VirtualBox
!
!       Key   Unshifted       Shifted         AltGraph        AltGraph-Shifted
!       ---   --------------- --------------- --------------- ----------------

keycode  49 = less            greater
keycode  94 = asciicircum     degree          asciicircum     degree
keycode  14 = 5               percent         bracketleft
keycode  15 = 6               ampersand       bracketright
keycode  16 = 7               slash           bar             backslash
keycode  17 = 8               parenleft       braceleft
keycode  18 = 9               parenright      braceright
keycode  24 = q               Q               q               Q
keycode  46 = l               L               at
keycode  57 = n               N               asciitilde

This works well on my MacBook Pro, your mileage may vary.

You can activate your remapping by saying something like:
xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc
In case something goes wrong and you render your keyboard useless, you can restart your X server by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace twice.
If you're happy with your remapping, you can automatically activate it on every login by using the System->Preferences->Sessions panel and adding an entry for the above xmodmap command there.

Conclusion

I hope this little exercise in some lesser known X-Windows commands (Hi Jörg) was useful for you, now you shouldn't need to worry too much about keyboard mapping inconsistencies any more.

If you want to learn a little more about modifying your keyboard, check out this section of the OpenSolaris docs.

The example keymap modifications above work well for me, but I'm sure I've forgotten a key or two. What other keys did you remap and why? Feel free to leave me a comment below.

: Online-Workshop: Besserer Klang mit wenig Aufwand von der niche09

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:24:44 +0000

This post is in German because it's about a Podcasting workshop in German language. If you want this workshop to be in English, feel free to gather a bunch of people and invite me to do it for you.

Am 20.6.2009 fand in München das Podcamp München statt, besser bekannt als niche09. An diesem Samstag trafen sich über 100 Podcast-Begeisterte in München und tauschten sich zu verschiedenen Themen rund um's Podcasting aus. Das Programm bot einen schönen Querschnitt durch das Thema und im http://www.niche09.de/">niche09-Blog kann man sich die Workshops noch in Form von verschiedenen Aufzeichnungen auch nachträglich und online kostenlos zu Gemüte führen. An dieser Stelle vielen Dank an Alex Wunschel, die Sponsoren und die vielen Helfer, die diese wirklich schöne Konferenz zustande gebracht haben!

Alex war auch so nett, mich einen Workshop zum Thema "Besserer Klang mit wenig Aufwand: Tipps & Tricks beim Podcast-Produzieren" moderieren zu lassen. Ein Audio-Mitschnitt samt synchroner Folien ist nun als Video erhältlich, in der Hoffnung, dass dieser Workshop auch online vielen Leuten bei der Produktion ihrer Podcasts helfen möge:

Den Workshop könnt Ihr unten direkt anschauen, als Quicktime-Video für den Rechner oder als iPhone-Video herunterladen, sowie Euch die Folien zum Workshop anschauen.

Hier noch ein paar Links, Anmerkungen und Korrekturen zum Workshop. Keine Angst, ich bekomme von keinem der genannten Hersteller irgendwas, sondern spreche nur aus eigener Erfahrung bzw. verlässlichen Quellen.

Nicht wundern, der "halbstündige Workshop" ist nur ein Witz, weil die Konferenz mit ca. 30 Min. Verspätung angefangen hat. Der Workshop war von vornherein auf 1 Stunde angelegt :).
Für mobile Aufnahmen ist das Zoom H2 und sein größerer Bruder Zoom H4 von Samson sehr beliebt. Für vergleichsweise wenig Geld erhält man eine sehr gute Aufnahme-Qualität und eine praktische, mobile Handhabung. Darüber hinaus kann das Gerät kann auch als gutes USB-Mikrofon dienen.Im Workshop lobte jemand auch den Audio-Recorder von Olympus (nicht sicher, ob dieses Modell gemeint war).
Die USB-Audio-Interfaces von M-Audio sind gut und günstig und für den Einstieg sehr empfehlenswert. Nach einiger Zeit bin ich jedoch aufgrund eines Tests im Professional Audio-Magazin zum Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1 gewechselt, das mich durch sehr gute, rauschfreie Audio-Qualität sowohl bei der Aufnahme als auch bei der Ausgabe über Kopfhörer und Aktivboxen beeindruckt hat.
Tim Pritlove vom Chaos Radio Express und MobileMacs empfahl uns die Beyerdynamic DT 297 Headsets für die stressfreie Aufnahme von mehreren Podcastern auf einmal, da die Mikros guten Klang bieten, man jede Stimme einzeln aufnehmen kann und die Kopfhörer präzises Feedback für die Sprecher erlauben. Alleine das richtige Audio-Interface/Mischpult/Vorschaltgerät, das jedem einzelnen seinen eigenen Feedback-Kanal gönnt und gleichzeitig eine getrennte Aufnahme ermöglicht, scheint noch ein ungelöstes Problem zu sein. Vielleicht hilft ein eigener Mehrkanal-Kopfhörerverstärker?
Im MacCast 2009.04.14 gibt es ein schönes Interview mit Heroes-Star David H. Lawrence XVII, der u.a. auch ein eigenes Studio betreibt und vom Radio kommend zum Podcaster geworden ist. Er hat viele nützliche Tipps parat und empfiehlt u.a. das Audio-Technica AT2020, insbesondere die USB-Variante AT2020 USB. Im Workshop hatte ich leider "Audio-Technica" mit "Behringer" als Hersteller verwechselt, ich bitte um Entschuldigung für die Verwirrung...
Auch in unserem HELDENFunk-Podcast verwenden wir das Audio-Technica AT2020, sowie ein paar Røde NT5 und können diese sehr empfehlen. Mehr Details gibt es in einem eigenen HELDENFunk behind the Scenes-Artikel. Inzwischen haben wir unser Setup um ein Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) 8pre 8-Fach Firewire Audio-Interface erweitert, das wir ebenfalls sehr empfehlen können.

Ich hoffe, dieser Workshop ist trotz der Länge von 1 Stunde für Euch nützlich. Schickt mir Euer Feedback, Fragen und Anregungen, bei der nächsten Konferenz (niche10?) bin ich gerne wieder dabei!

: Paris in the Clouds: A CloudCamp Paris report

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:57:08 +0000

Last week, Eric Bezille invited me to Paris for a couple of Cloud Computing related meetings and to help out with CloudCamp Paris. Paris in the clouds, what a nice experience!

This was also a great opportunity to try out the audio recording features of my LiveScribe Pulse pen. This pen not only can record what you write (on special dot paper), it can also record what has been said while you write, creating links between the words you write and the points in time of the audio recording. Very cool. You can then tap on the words in your notebook and the pen will play back the associated audio. Great for conferences, and I wish I had had this pen during my university times :). You can also export your notes including the audio as a flash movie and share them on the net, which is what I'm going to do below.

Intro Session and Lightning Talks

The CloudCamp was kicked off by a representative of Institut Telecom, the location sponsor of CloudCamp Paris. Sam Johnston gave a short and sweet introduction to Clouds, providing some definitions, examples and also some contrarian views, finishing with a short video on how easy it is to set up your account in the cloud.

A series of lightning talks by the sponsors gave us some interesting news, insights and context for the conference:

Eric Bezille from Sun showed us what's behind Sun's cloud activities.
Arvid Fossen from Aserver.com talked about how they provide datacenters as a service to their clients. Wanna have your own cloud? Go buy it as a turnkey solution!
Matthew Hugo (Not sure if I got that name right...) from Runmyprocess.com showed some nice examples of integration between different cloud services.
Josh Fraser, VP of Business Development at Rightscale showed some impressive examples of how the cloud can neatly adjust to your business demand curve.
Peter Martin from Orange Business Services showed us some pictures of his kids who use clouds based services today (Facebook anyone?), pointing out that when they'll grow up to be CEOs, CIOs and decision makers, they're most likely not going to operate their own datacenters. Food for thought for the sceptics who think Cloud Computing is just a temporary hype or not ready (yet) for prime time: Just wait 'til your kids grow up. It may happen sooner than that, though, given the enthusiasm of the more than 100 people in the room...
Finally, Owen Garrett from Zeus provided a really good reason for using a software load balancer: Take back control of your application!

Here are two pencasts with audio and notes taken during the above lightning talks. The first one covers the intro until and including the Rightscale talk, the second one starts with the Orange talk and finishes with the Zeus talk.

CloudCamp Paris June 2009 Intro Session
brought to you by Livescribe

CloudCamp Paris June 2009, Intro Session Part 2
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The Unpanel

I've been to a couple of unconferences before, but this was my first unpanel. Dave Nielsen asked the attendees about who thought they were an expert on Cloud Computing. A couple of hands went up and whoosh - there you have seven experts for a panel :). Then he asked the group to provide seven questions for the panel to answer, after which each of the panelists got to answer one. For each question, the group was asked whether there was potential for some more discussion on that topic, so we also had a good basis for creating some spontaneous sessions during the conference part. Listen to the whole unpanel session on the right.

CloudCamp Paris June 2009 Unpanel session
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Cloud Architecture Session

After the introductory sessions and the unpanel, it was time for the breakouts. There were four of them: Cloud Security (moderated by Luc Wijns from Sun), Cloud Architecture, Open Clouds and Cloud Business Opportunities. Sébastien Pahl from DotCloud and I moderated the Cloud Architecture session. After some introductory slides, Sébastien explained his work on creting portable cloud-based services (including leverating Solaris Containers). (Sébastien, let me know when you have your slides online...). We then let the group share their questions, answeres, thoughts and discussion points. We talked about scaling MySQL in the cloud, or perhaps it would be better to leave the traditional relational model and use a simple key/value alternatives such as CouchDB. Developers asked whether they'll be able to use their IDEs with the cloud (hint: Check out NetBeans...) or whether they need to throw it all away and learn everything from scratch. How much should developers care about scalability? Isn't that something the cloud should provide? What about different APIs? Does it make sense to write your own abstraction layer? Message queues were also a popular topic and we noticed that RESTful interfaces are everywhere. I liked the final statement of one attendee most: Maybe clouds are forcing us to rethink a lot of our developer concepts so we can actually sit down and start writing clean code for a change!

Here's the audio recording from the architecture session. I tried to write down some notes after they have been discussed so you can try and skip to the pieces you're most interested in. The audio is a bit low volume, but still quite intelligible.

CloudCamp Paris June 2009 Session on Cloud Architecture
brought to you by Livescribe

Wrapping It All Up

After the breakouts, a surprisingly large number of attendees were still there despite being late into the evening to gather and listen to the summaries of the different sessions. Here's the recording, including some notes to help you navigate.

CloudCamp Paris June 2009 Wrap-up
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All in all, this was a great event. A big thank you to Eric and his team in Paris and the sponsors for setting this up! More than ever, it became clear to me how significant the trend towards cloud computing is and how many talented people are part of this community, driving the future of IT into the sky.

Update: Eric now published his own summary with a lot of background information. It's a great read, so check it out!

: OpenSolaris meets Mac OS X in Munich

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:32:51 +0000

Last Wednesday, Wolfgang and I had the honor to present at "Mac Treff München", Munich's local Mac User Group. There are quite a few touching points between OpenSolaris and Mac OS X, such as ZFS, DTrace and VirtualBox, we thought it would be a good idea to contact them out of our Munich OpenSolaris User Group and talk a little bit about OpenSolaris.

Breaking the Ice

We were a little bit nervous about what would happen. Do Mac people care about the innards of a different, seemingls non-GUIsh OS? Are they just fanboys or are they open to other people's technologies? Will talking about redundancy, BFU, probes and virtualization bore them to death?

Fortunately, the 30-40 people that attended the event proved to be a very nice, open and tolerant group. They let us talk about OpenSolaris in General including some of the nitty-grittyness of the development process, before we started talking about the features that are more interesting to Mac users. We then talked about ZFS, DTrace and VirtualBox:

ZFS for Mac OS X (or not (yet)?)

Explaining the principles behind ZFS to people who are only used to draging'n'dropping icons, shooting photos or video and using computers to get work done, without having to care about what happens inside, is not easy. We concentrated on getting the basics of the tree structure, copy-on-write, check-summing and using redundancy to self-heal while using real world examples and metaphors to illustrate the principles. Here's the deal: If you have lots of important data (photos, recording, videos, anyone?) and care about it (content creators...), then you need to be concerned about data availability and integrity. ZFS solves that, it's that simple. A little animation in the slides were quite helpful in explaining that, too :).

The bad news is that ZFS seems to have vanished from all of Apple's communication about the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard release. That's really bad, because many developers and end-users were looking forward to take advantage of it.

The good news is that there are still ways to take advantage of ZFS as a Mac User: Run an OpenSolaris file server for archiving your data or using it as a TimeMachine store, or even run a small OpenSolaris ZFS Server inside your Mac through VirtualBox.

DTrace: A Mac Developer/Admin's Heaven, Albeit in Jails

Next, we dove a little bit into DTrace and how it makes the OS really transparent for admins, developers and users. In addition to the dtrace(1) command, Apple created a nice GUI called "Instruments" as part of their XCode development environment that leverages the DTrace infrastructure to collect useful data about your application in realtime.

Alas, as with ZFS, there's another downer, and this time it's more subtle: While you can enjoy the power of DTrace in Mac OS X now, it's still kinda crippled, as Adam Leventhal pointed out: Processes can escape the eyes of DTrace at will, which counters the absolute observability idea of DTrace quite massively. Yes, there are valid reasons for both sides of the debate, but IMHO, legal things should be enforced using legal means, and software should be treated as software, meaning it is not a reliable way of enforcing any license contracts - with or without powerful tools such as DTrace.

OpenSolaris for all: VirtualBox

Finally, a free present to the Mac OS X community: VirtualBox. I still get emails asking me to spend 80+ dollars on some virtualization software for my Mac. There are at least two choices in that price range: VMware Workstation and Parallels. Well, the good news is that you can save your 80 bucks and use VirtualBox instead.

This may not be new to you, since as a reader of my blog you've likely heard of VirtualBox before, but it's always amazing for me to see how slowly these things spread. So, after reading this article, do your Mac friends a favour and tell them they can save precious money buy just downloading VirtualBox instead of spending money on other virtualization solutions for the Mac. It's really that simple.

Indeed, this was the part where the attendees took most of their notes, and asked a lot of questions about (ZFS being a close first in terms of discussion/questions).

Conclusion

After our presentations, a lot of users came up and asked questions about how to install OpenSolaris on their hardware and on VirtualBox. Some even asked where to buy professional services for installing them an OpenSolaris ZFS fileserver in their company. The capabilities of ZFS clearly struck some chords inside the Mac OS X community, which is no wonder: If you have lots of Audio/Video/Photo data and care about quality and availability, then there's no way around FS.

I used this event as an excuse to try out keynote, which worked quite well for me, especially because it helped me create some easy to understand animations about the mechanics of ZFS. I also liked the automatic guides a lot which help you position elements on your slides very easily and seem to guess very well what your layout intentions were. I'd love the OpenOffice folks to check out Keynote's guides and see if they can come up with something similar. So, here's a Keynote version of my "OpenSolaris for Mac Users" slides as well as a PDF version (both in German) for you to check out and re-use if you like.

Update: Wolfgang's introductory slides are now available for download as well and Klaus, the organizer of the event, posted a review in the Mac Treff München Blog with some pictures, too.

: DevDusk June 2009 in Munich

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:31:08 +0000

Last week, DevDusk June 2009 took place at the Sun office in Munich.

What is DevDusk, you ask?

To me, it's the ultimate geek after-work party: Every once in a while, developers gather after their work day and chat about current cool technologies. Think after work mini-unconference. There are DevDusks in Frankfurt and in Munich, and this time we were lucky to sponsor the latest incarnation out of the Sun Startup Essentials program.

After some food and beers, we had a nice variety of talks:

Wolfgang Stief talked about one of the coolest hobbies: Collecting and restoring old computers. Not just C-64s and Commodore Amigas, no, the real stuff: Control Data Mainframes, Crays, etc., including a project to build a full tube-based computer. He shared a lot of funny stories involving the many obstacles in transporting, reparing and operating huge digital beasts. Check out the cray-cyber.org website and Wolfgang's collection of photos on Flickr.
Wolfram Kriesing from uxebu.com introduced us to EventNinja, a clever way to leverage free Cloud services (Google Docs, Yahoo! Pipes) to create fully functional, intelligent and customizable widgets, without the need to operate any server infrastructure by yourself other than a simple static web server. Very cool and a glimpse of a whole generation of clever, light-weight distributed cloud widgets. I'm working on a similar thing myself, more on that in a future blog post.
And yes, I got to present something too. I used the opportunity to introduce the group to my personal definition of Cloud Computing, the Sun Cloud, highlighting it's REST APIs and encouraging the audience to play around with Zembly while they're waiting for the Sun Cloud to become publicly available.

Slides, links and other material are available from the DevDusk Munich event page, feel free to check them out (some may be in Germany, but what's a little language barrier to tech people anyway?). Also, check out Gabi's blog entry on this event as well as related Twitter comments.

: Video: Top 5 Cool Features of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:19:31 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, Marc (our producer from the HELDENFunk Podcast) and I sat down and put together a video about the top 5 reasons why the new Sun Storage 7000 systems are so cool. We even "invited" Brendan Gregg to show us his latest trick:

For the next video, I'll try to learn more phrases by heart and look less at the prompter screen for a more natural feel. I apologize for my German accent (some people say it adds credibility :) ). Still, people seem to like the video, at least it has been viewed about 200 times already.

There's a lot of discussion around the Sun Storage 7000, most of it is very positive. In Germany, we like to complain a lot so of course we also hear a lot of constructive criticism. Most of the comments I hear fall into one of the two following categories:

The Storage 7000 systems are cool, but I know ZFS/OpenSolaris can do "X" and I really want this to be in the Storage 7000 GUI as well!
Yes, we know that there are still many features we'd like to see in the Storage 7000 and we're working on making them available. Make sure your Sun contact knows about your wishlist, so she can forward it to our engineers. Please remember that the Storage 7000 systems are meant to be easy-to-use appliances: Taking your "X" feature from ZFS/OpenSolaris and building a GUI around it is a hard thing to do, especially if you want it to work reliably and if you want it to be self-explanatory and self-serviceable. Please be patient, we're most probably working on your favourite features already.
The Storage 7000 systems are cool, but I want more control. I want to change the hardware/hack them/take them apart/add more functionality/get them to do exactly what I want, etc.
Sure, that feature is called "OpenSolaris". Please go to OpenSolaris.org, download the CD, install it on your favourite hardware and off you go!
But, can I have the GUI, too, maybe as an SDK of some sort?
No. The Storage 7000 systems are not "just a GUI". They are full-blown appliances which means that they're more than just the hardware and a GUI. A big part of the ease-of-use, stability, performance and predictability of these products is in the way configuration options are selected, tested and yes, limited, as well as a careful consideration of which features to implement at what time and which not. Only then comes the GUI on top, which is tailored to the overall product as a whole. In other words: You wouldn't go to BMW and ask them to give you their dashboard, radio and the lights so you can bolt them onto a Volkswagen, would you?

You see, either you build your own storage machine out of the building blocks you have, and get all the functionality and flexibility you want at the expense of some configuration effort, or you buy the car as a whole, nice, round, sweet package, so you don't worry about configuration, implementation details, complexity, etc. Asking for anything in between will get you into trouble: Either you'll spend more effort than you want, or you won't get the kind of control you want.

If you understand German, there's some discussion of this topic as well as a great overview of the MySQL future plus a primer on SSDs in the latest episode of the HELDENFunk podcast.

And if you like the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems as much as I do, here are the slides in StarOffice format, as well as in PDF format, so you can tell your colleagues and friends as well.

: Top 3 Cloud Computing Principles

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:26:24 +0000

As with every new topic in IT, people are wondering about the same questions: Hype or reality? Didn't we kinda have this before? What's in it for me? What's so special about it? Cloud computing is no exception and I've had the privilege to discuss this topic with a number of very bright people over the last couple of months.

To separate the wheat from the chaff, here are the top three key principles of cloud computing that struck me as making this topic very relevant, interesting and definitely the way of the future:

#1: Abstraction

For decades, IT providers have tried to standardize their operations so they can concentrate on optimizing their IT.

But this is in contrast to what IT developers and users want: They want their special version of Apache, with the newest version of PHP and "sorry, but I can't live without these 5 plugins in exactly that versions".

So much for standardization, and thus we ended up with dozens of different versions of the same services, hundreds of different services that we grew up over time with ("Of course we need the foo service, our company can't live without it! No, we can't re-implement it, that would be too expensive, you'll have to continue operating it!"). This is why compute centers today tend to look like Frankenstein's lab instead of the clean infrastructure we'd really like to have, from an architecture perspective.

Cloud computing has found a way to break out of this: A cloud gives you just a few basic, but well-defined services and that's it. Take it or leave it. "Do you like our simple, RESTful foo interface? Fine, use it!", or: "Oh, you want your own special custom version? Sorry, we don't have it. Go away." It's that simple.

This is obviously good for cloud providers, because they now can optimize the bejeezus out of their infrastructure and provide nice, massive scale, low-cost, simple to administer services, which is every IT provider's dream come true.

The new thing here is that now the developers have realized this is good for them, too (and Amazon's success is a testimony to that effect): They can now use whatever version of their software they want, on whatever OS they want and get as many updates as they want, without having to ask their IT provider.

Granted, now the burden of managing the software falls onto the developer/user, but in the end this is a win-win for both, because both sides know exactly what to expect from the other, the rules are clear, and the interface between provider and developer/user is well-defined. Of course, low service costs to the developer always helps, but we'll get to that later.

So the key point here is that well-defined abstraction layers between clouds and developers/users are the grease that lets both sides operate efficiently and completely independent of each other.

#1.1: Layers of Abstraction in Clouds

There are three layers of abstraction in clouds:

Application as a Service (AaaS): This is what the end-user gets when they use a service like GMail, DropBox (please make an OpenSolaris version, thanks), the myriads of Facebook apps, SmugMug or even Adobe's online photoshop web service. AaaS services are very popular and there's really no reason to start a new application any other way today.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): The abstraction layer here is some kind of developer environment, but the details of implementation (OS, Hardware, etc.) are completely hidden. You just get a programming language and some APIs/Libraries and off you go. This is what Zembly gives you (check it out and create your own Facebook app in minutes), or the Google App Engine. This is the development model of the future: Develop against the cloud, no need to know the details behind it.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): These are the Amazon S3s, EC2s, etc. and we recently introduced our own version of IaaS as the Sun Cloud (featuring open interfaces and a lot of Sun technology goodness under the hood.) In this model, you get access to a virtual server or virtual storage, treat them like real machines, but the physical details of what machine is in what rack or which disks you use are hidden from you.

Most discussions around clouds center around IaaS, but remember that the basic principle of abstraction applies to the other two as well. Also, many AaaS offerings are either implemented on top of a PaaS or IaaS offerings on someone else's cloud, so we already see a whole ecosystem of cloud components working together in a pyramid like fashion, building on top of each other.

The nice thing about the Sun Cloud here is that it'll open up the abstraction layer. Just like programming environments, file server or web protocols, there's a lot of value in open standards and interfaces. That's what Sun's cloud offering is about, so our "open grease" between cloud providers and developers will enable freedom of choice, better interoperability and bigger, open cloud market for all. Check out "RESTing on the Cloud with Open APIs" for a discussion on the Sun Cloud APIs.

#2: Automation

Again, this may seem like nothing new, because IT operators have tried to automate as much as possible within their datacenters forever. From our own history of Sun MC through N1 and now xVM Ops Center to other people's Tivoli's, OpenView and whathave you, we've seen a lot in data center automation, but none of these went the whole way of providing true one-click setup or tear-down of a complete server over the public internet.

Automation in the cloud means the developer/user is in complete, automatic control over their resources. No human interaction whatsoever, even from a developer/user perspective. Need more servers? Let the load-balancer tell the cloud how many more to provide. No need to wait for someone to unpack and cable your machine, no need to wait for your IT department to find the time to install. Everything is automatic.

Again, this is a win-win for both sides. While full automation reduces cost and complexity for the cloud provider, it puts the developer/user in control. Now you can reduce your time to market for your next rollout because you can do it yourself, fully automatic, and you don't need to call anybody, rely on someone else to set up stuff for you, or wait days until some minor hardware/software installation is completed.

The Sun Cloud brings automation to the next level: With its Virtual Datacenter Technology, you'll be able to automate a full virtual datacenter in the cloud out of standard components, not just individual machines.

#3: Elasticity

In the nineties, people bought large, expensive, scalable servers and waited for them to fill up over time as their companies grew. This was of course highly inefficient because most of the time you didn't use most of your server. After the dot-com bust, people became smarter and started scaling horizontally. That allowed you to add capacity to your datacenter in smaller chunks and on an as-needed basis. But what if you need a lot of capacity on one day (because your startup got Techcrunched), but the next day you're back to humble levels of usage, because it's the weekend or the wrong season or there's a major recession coming up? As an extreme case: What if you ran the Olympics website and the games are just over?

That's when elasticity comes in very handy: You can easily scale up your cloud usage, but you can just as easily scale it down again. One day you have 500 web servers, 50 app servers and 10 database servers, the next day you could easily go back to the old 50:5:2 ratio. And you only pay for what you use, never for what could have been.

On a technical level, elasticity is a direct outcome of automation, our #2 principle outlined above.

But the real invention here is in the business model of cloud providers: By multiplexing their resources over a large number of customers, they can level out differing capacity needs, so that they get good resource utilization on a big scale, no matter how much or little resources individual users actually use. And by giving their customers transparent access to this model, they enable them to take advantage of a fully elastic pay-per-use-no-strings-attached model that makes a cloud service so attractive.

And this is what your traditional hoster never gave you before: Whenever you wanted some service from an old-school hoster, you'd have to sign a contract that looks like a mobile phone contract with lots of fine print and whatnot. It's easy to scale up, but then you have to commit to some usage period (like 24 months) and usually it's hard or downright impossible to scale down the size of the service you got. You could easily get stuck.

Cloud computing changes everything with its "look Ma, I can scale like Google!" model: Everybody with a credit card can operate a large datacenter for whatever time they want (and have credit for), and shut it down whenever they like.

The Sun Cloud will expand the business possibilities of the cloud model: You can choose to be the cloud (and we'll help you build it), you can choose to build the cloud (for others, out of our cloud components), you can build your own cloud (we'll help you build that, too) or you can just use it (the Sun Cloud). Just like we believe in open standards, we also believe in partnering, so no matter what your cloud business model is, Sun can help.

Conclusion

A lot of people discuss a lot of aspects of clouds these days, but to me, it's just the three principles above that really count.

You can use them as a litmus test for clouds: Where's the abstraction layer? Is it open? Is it fully automated? Where's the API? What if I scale down, not up? What's the cost model? If one of the above principles are missing, it's probably not a cloud. If they are there, it's most probably a cloud.

Or you can use these three principles to figure out if your internal IT operations are ready for the cloud: Can you implement your service by exclusively using a cloud API? Would you be able to encapsulate your current service inside a virtual machine, then redeploy elsewhere? How about using a PaaS model for developing your next app? Do you really want to afford your own IT infrastructure if you can just rent it like a taxi? What services would need to be re-implemented, and why? These are all good questions to ask when discussing clouds with colleagues and vendors.

But remember that cloud computing is not going to end hunger, bring world peace and cure cancer, all at once and today: Some services fit the cloud model very well (hint: Everything that looks like a web service also looks like a good candidate), some don't (If it's still on a mainframe, forget it). The answer is almost always a mixture, and it will become more interesting as public and private clouds start to interoperate, much like intranets and the internet interoperate today.

Useful Cloud Resources

There's a lot to learn about clouds and a lot of bright people are blogging about it. Here are a few points to start from:

Play a bit on Zembly.com. This is a great IDE for web apps, offered as a PaaS in the cloud. Translation: Log in and create your own Facebook/Meebo/iPhone app in your browser in minutes, the social way.
Check out the Innovating@Sun blog entry on "RESTing on the Cloud with Open APIs" to learn about what Hal Stern and Tim Bray have to say on the Sun Coud's RESTful APIs. Also, the Virtual Datacenter Demo is very impressive, and there are a number of other interesting videos on that site.
Glenn Brunette has a lot to say about security and clouds, certainly a hot topic. His Immutable Service Containers are the way to go for securely deploying web services in large infrastructures, including clouds.
If you understand German, there are some excellent German blogs to read. Check out Ralf Zenses' Blog, or Jan Brosowski's (who offers a slightly different definition of cloud principles) or the Serverwolken blog.
If you prefer to read English, don't despair. Check out the Sun Cloud Blog, or Alka Gupta's Blog with many interesting articles. Marc Hamilton also let's you look at cool hardware building blocks for the cloud as well as HPC clouds.
There's a great whitepaper from Berkeley University called Above the Clouds, a real must-read. Also, there's a great Cloud Computing Guide on the Sun Cloud page, well worth the small hassle to register for it.
Finally, if you think you've read enough, then relax by watching a cool video from our partner rPath: Cloud Computing in Plain English.

What are your cloud principles? What aspects of cloud computing are important to you? What important cloud aspect am I missing that would warrant its own principle? Feel free to add your own comment on cloud computing to this post!

: Cloud Computing in 6 Minutes

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:56:54 +0000

Yesterday I visited Sun's European Education & Research Conference in Berlin where my colleague Manuel and I ran a session on Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. Web 2.0 companies have really pioneered the use of cloud computing for their businesses, taking advantage of the low entry cost and high elasticity that clouds provide. These are really good things if you only have a few hundred or so users on one day, then all of a sudden you face hundreds of thousands of them, just because somebody featured your company on Techcrunch or some famous VC twittered about your service. So the two subjects go really well together so our session room was quite packed and we had some good discussions with attendees afterwards.

Sun Campus Ambassadors Alper Celik and Gökhan Dogan from KTH University in Sweden were busy interviewing a lot of people during the conference with their digital camera, and both Manuel and I got our few minutes of YouTube fame with them. Here's Manuel talking about Web 2.0:

And here's yours truly, trying to explain Cloud Computing in about 6 minutes:

Curious about Cloud Computing? Check out the Sun Cloud or start developing Web Services inside the Cloud from the comfort of your web browser the easy way using Zembly.

Alper and Gökhan were really busy, they published a bunch of other interviews on YouTube the very same day. Just search YouTube for "European Education and Research Conference" and you'll find more than a dozen of their interviews.

Gökhan also participated in his university's WaterWell project that used Sun SPOT technology to create a wireless sensor network that monitors water quality. Here's Gökhan explaining his project:

With a generation of students that show this kind of motivation, I'm not really worried about how to come out of this recession :).

: Think Twice Before Deleting Stuff (Or Better Not at All!)

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:07:19 +0000

No, this is not going to be another "Remember to do snapshots" post. I'm also not going to talk about backups. Instead, let's look at some very practical aspects of deleting files.

So, why delete a file? "Trivial", you think, "so I can save space!". Sure, dear reader, but at the expense of what?

Let's stop and think for a minute. Our lives try to center around doing cool, worthwhile, meaningful, useful stuff. Deleting files isn't really cool, nor fun, it is a necessity we're forced to do. Don't you hate it when that dreaded "Your startup disk is almost full" message appears while you're in the middle of downloading new photos from your latest exciting vacation trip?

Actually, the seemingly simple act of deleting is really a challenge: "Will I need this again?", "Wouldn't it be better to archive this instead?", "Last time I was really glad I kept that email from 2 years ago, so why delete this one?". Sometimes I surprise myself thinking a long time before I really press that "ok" button or hit "Enter" after the "rm".

The reality is: Storage is cheap, so why delete stuff in the first place?

To put things in perspective, let's try an ROI analysis of deleting files. Let's say we need about 6 seconds of thinking time before we can decide whether a particular file can really be deleted without regret. Let's also assign some value to our time, say $12 per hour (I hope you're getting paid much more than that, but this is just to keep the numbers simple).

Storage is cheap, and last time I checked, a 1 TB USB hard drive cost about $100 at a major electronics retailer, with prices falling by the hour.

Now, how much space does the act of deleting a file need to free up so it justifies the effort of deciding whether to delete or keep it?

Well, our $12 per hour conveniently breaks down to $0.20 per minute, which allows us to perform 10 delete-it-or-not decisions per minute at $0.02 each. Fine. Deleting seems to be cheap, doesn't it?

Now, for that $0.02 you can buy a 1/5000th of a 1 TB hard drive. Wait a minute, 1TB/5000 still amounts to 200 MB of data per $0.02! That's more than you need to store a 10 minute video, or a full CD of music, compressed at high quality! Or 20 presentations at 10MB each! Not to mention countless emails, source code and other files!

So, unless the file you're pondering is bigger than 200MB, it's not really worth even considering to delete it. I'll call this 200MB boundary the "Destructive Utility Heuristic (DUH)".

The result is therefore: Save your time, buy more harddisk space (or upgrade your old hard drive to a bigger one before it dies) and move on. Life's too precious to waste it on deleting stuff. Create good stuff instead! Only think about deleting stuff if the file in question is bigger than 200MB.

I can hear some "Wait, but!"'s in the audience, ok, one at a time:

"But I can delete much faster than 6 seconds!"
No big deal. So you can delete 1 file per second, that's still a threshold of 33MB, more than 5 songs worth or even the biggest practical business presentation or the source code to a major open source project. And harddisks are getting cheaper every day, while your time will become more and more precious as you age. Yes, if you're dead sure that file is useless junk and don't need to think about it, go ahead and delete it, but why did you save it in the first place?
"But I like my directories to be clean and tidy!"
Congratulations, that's a good habit! Keeping files organized doesn't mean you need to delete stuff, though. Set up an "Archive" folder somewhere and dump everything you think you may or may not use again there. Use one archive folder for each year if you want. File search technology is pretty advanced these days so you should be able to find your archived files quicker than the time you'd take to decide which ones you'll never want to find again. Then, you can still decide to delete your whole archive from 3 years ago because you never used it, and it will likely make some sense, because its size may be above the destructive utility heuristic, but chances are you won't really care because storage will have become even cheaper after those 3 years so you won't save a big deal, relatively speaking.
"That still doesn't help me when that damn 'Your startup disk is almost full' message comes!"
You're right. The point is: It's often hard to sift through data and decide what to keep and what not. That's why we dread deleting stuff and instead wait until that message comes. I'm only offering relief to those that felt that the act of having to delete stuff isn't really rewarding, and it isn't (at least while you're below the DUH). Go buy a bigger harddrive for your laptop, it's really the cost effective option. Use the numbers above to help you justify that towards your finance department.
"I'm still not convinced. I actually kinda like going through my files and delete them once in a while..."
Sure, go ahead. Just know that you could use that time to do more productive stuff, such as checking out the Sun cloud, installing OpenSolaris or testing our new Sun OpenStorage products.
"Wait, aren't you supposed to write about OpenSolaris, ZFS and this stuff anyway?"
I'm glad you mentioned that :). Actually, OpenSolaris and ZFS make it even easier for you to both not care about deleting stuff while keeping your files organized at the same time. The amazing ZFS auto snapshot SMF service will create snapshots of your data automagically every 15 minutes, so it won't matter whether you delete files or not. You can then choose to either not delete them at all and just move them to some archive, or you can delete whatever you want, without the 6 seconds of thinking (just to keep stuff tidy), knowing that you'll always be able to recover those files with Time Slider later. You could then use zfs send/receive to dump your data incrementally to a file server as a backup mechanism and the hooks are already there to automate this.

See, once you think of it, there's not really a need to delete files at all any more. At least not for mere mortals like us with file sizes that are typically below the destructive utility heuristic of currently 200MB (and rising...) most of the time. Music has already reached the point where a song can be stored at studio quality with lossless compression at manageable file sizes so that kind of data won't see significant growth any more. And photos and videos will soon follow. This means we'll need to care less and less about restricting personal data storage. Instead, we now need to focus more on managing personal storage.

Now there's a completely different problem that'll keep us entertained for some time...

: The Inner Life of ZFS: Cool ZFS On-Disk Block Structure Movies

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:08:10 +0000

Pascal Gienger of Konstanz University published a nifty DTrace script that captures ZFS' on-disk block activity and published it on his Southbrain blog.

The cool thing: He animated the data. That's right. Using a Perl script, he draws greener or redder dots depending on whether a particular range of blocks on disk sees more reads or writes. By aggregating data over many hours while doing interesting tasks such as backup, he created a series of very cool animations.

In his first post, he shows us the inner life of a Postfix mail queue as an animated GIF:

Then, he compared the write patterns of UFS vs. ZFS using a MySQL workload to produce a cool MPEG-4 movie.

In his latest ZFS animation work, he shows us 18 hours of a mirrored file server including some backup, night rest and user action (Download MPEG-4 Movie here).

Congratulations, Pascal, this is way cool stuff. You really should upload these to YouTube so people can embed them in their blogs :).

Update: Meanwhile, pascal told me that he uploaded his videos on YouTube already. He has a full playlist full of them. Enjoy!

: Munich OpenSolaris User Group Install Fest

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:50:08 +0000

Yesterday we had the first Munich OpenSolaris User Group (MUCOSUG) install fest at Munich Technical University's Mathematics and Computer Science Building in the Garching Campus. Many thanks go to Martin Uhl for organizing coffee, meeting room and overall help!

The building is very cool, featuring two giant parabolic slides that go all the way from 3rd floor to the ground floor. Check out some construction pictures here.

We began the meeting with a short presentation on OpenSolaris as a home server (here are the slides, let me know if you want the source). It covers some thoughts on why you need a home server (hints: Photos, multimedia clients, backups, first-hand Solaris experience), where to get some extra software, first steps in ZFS, CIFS server and iSCSI and some useful blogs to follow up with for more good home-server specific content.

Most of the people had OpenSolaris installed already, either on their laptops or inside VirtualBox. So most of the conversation was centered around tips for setting up home server hardware, how to install the VirtualBox guest additions and why, or what the best ways are to integrate VirtualBox networking and exchange files between host and guest.

I learned that sharing the host interface with the Virtual Box guest has become as painless as using NAT with the added benefit of making your guest be a first-class citizen on your network, so that's what I'll try out next. Also, the cost of 32 GB USB sticks has come way down at acceptable speed rates, so I'll try one of them to host my OpenSolaris work environment and free my local harddisk a bit.

All in all, such geek gatherings are always a nice excuse to sit together and chat about the newest in technology, find new ideas and have a beer or two afterwards, so how about organizing your own OpenSolaris Installfest in your neighbourhood now?

Update: The way how to set up CIFS in OpenSolaris turned out to be slightly more complicated. Please check the above slides for an updated list of commands on how to set this up. I forgot to include how to expand /etc/pam.conf and assumed this was automatic. Sorry, must be because I set this up at home a while ago...

: Challenges and Opportunities 2009

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:07:25 +0000

This Wednesday I was invited to speak at "Challenges and Opportunities 2009", an informal, almost barcamp-like gathering of startup companies and other bright and innovative people in the center of Munich. The name is the topic and so the focus was on how to make the best of the current economic situation. Surprisingly, the overall feeling of the conference was quite relaxed, almost cheery, as if the econonmy wasn't really that relevant. Just the right attitude to have, I'd say.

Nicholas MacGowan von Holstein of Twidox.com took the effort of putting this event together, which was a remarkable feat, given that he was in the middle of entering open beta with his startup at the same time. Twidox is a new startup company that offers a platform for the collaborative exchange of high-quality documents. The idea comes from Nicholas' experience during his university days where students would spend a lot of time researching publications and trying to find relevant papers to a certain topic. Twidox lets you both publish and search for documents and helps you make sense out of them through tagging, rating and other mechanisms. Actually, there are quite a few parallels to our own SunSpace document management system and so it was not surprising to see Nicholas and Peter having a great interest in each other's work.

Each presentation was limited to 5-10 minutes which was a good thing to keep the pace going. We heard from Terry Bibra about Yahoo's strategy of openness, Stephan Uhrenbacher from Qype talked about principles they observed when creating their startup, Ingo Dahm from Microsoft highlighted some opportunities that today's technologies offer and Nicholas Kirschner of High-Tech-Gründerfonds offered his insight as a venture capitalist about the good, the bad and the ugly of VCs during difficult times. The ticketing logistics of the event were done through Amiando, a fast growing German startup that provides streamlined ticketing operations to everyone. Felix Haas from Amiando offered his own views as a startup, highlighting flexibility in finding the right business model and pointing out that startups don't necessarily need to go for a multi-million Dollar exit.

My own talk was about "Survival 2.0", inspired by Tim Bray's "The Fear Factor" talk at FOWA 2008 that he also elaborated about in a series of inspiring blog posts. Tim talked to developers, so I mixed in some of my own experience of having gone through the Dot-Com Bubble and made a 5-point list of tips to get you through tough times, that everyone of us can use today. Most, if not all of these tips are just common sense, it's just that we sometimes tend to lose our common sense when the going get's tough...

The fine people at Tiburon-TV have recorded the talk and you can watch a video of "Survival 2.0" here. The slides are available from Twidox as well. It's all in German but if you're interested, I can send you a translated version of the slides so you can use them for your own presentations.

Also, check out the Twitter buzz around this event's #cando09 hashtag. It's quite fascinating how dynamic instant communication has become today...

: Start Believing in Artists, not the Music Industry

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:32:44 +0000

A few months ago, while driving home from the in-laws, we heard Normcast episode 119, a German podcast full of nice little fragments, pieces of music and other fun stuff. In this episode, Norman played Matthew Ebel's song "Everybody Needs a Robot" (lyrics, YouTube video) and, being the geek that I am, I liked it a lot.

I asked Norman whether the song was podsafe, it turned out it was not, so I asked Matt directly for permission to use his song in a podcast. He kindly agreed and so we played it during HELDENFunk episode 22 around September 2008. As a way of saying "Thanks!" I bought Matt's latest album "Goodbye Planet Earth" off of CDBaby.com, a website where independent artists such as Matt can publish their own CDs without the need of a traditional record company.

Later, during an event called "Mission Future", which was part of Ars Electronica 2008, I watched a presentation from Pim Betist about a cool new website called "Sellaband". Sellaband is a crowdfunding website that brings musicians together with their fans (called "Believers") and help them raise real money ($50,000) to record an album in a high-quality studio, with professional producers and market it using a real distribution chain.

Now, the two powers have collied: Matt recently joined Sellaband and he's on his way to financing his next album there!

Why am I telling you all of this? Because this is the biggest shift in the entertainment industry since the introduction of recordable media.

Think of it: Now artists can create their own CDs, all by themselves, from writing the lyrics, writing the music, producing demos, connecting with fans, raising funds, managing production and selling their work, all without a single mention of what was formerly known as "the recording industry". While the RIAA and their likes are still behaving like little kids who have lost their toys, music artists have started to take control over their carreers and simply optimized away unnecessary intermediaries out of the equation.

So how does this work? A little bit like owning stock, but with more fun and better "dividends": The $50,000 budget that is needed to produce an artist's album is split into 5,000 "parts", at $10 each. For as little as $10 (1 part), you can become a "Believer" in an artist that is listed on Sellaband. Being a Believer gives you the right to receive a limited edition of that artist's album, once it is recorded. Think of it: This is cheaper than most regular CDs, so there's nothing to lose here. Actually, this is just where the fun starts: Each part entitles its owner to 0,01% of the album's revenue. So if you have a good "nose" for finding successful artists, you can even get some money back out of your investment! You can own more than one part and the more parts you buy, the nicer the perks become. From "Believer" (1 part) to "Promoter" (2 parts), "Publisher" (5 parts and you start earning publishing revenue), "V.I.P." (10), "Crew" (50), "Music Angel" (100) all the way to "Executive Producer" (1000 parts, free trip to the studio baby!). Check out the full "what's in it for me" list.

Back to Matt: His music is a modern version of songwriter-style piano rock. A little bit like Billy Joel, maybe with some Elton John thrown in, but with a modern twist: He likes to add loops, electronic sounds or samples into his songs to add to the atmosphere without them becoming distracting. The lyrics are insightful, full of life, spirit, humor and a little irony. Check out his bio for a much better description of him and his music.

But Matt is more than that: He is a leading example of how an artist can connect to his audience using Web 2.0: He has his own paid subscription service, sells his music online on iTunes, CDBaby and MySpace, including online merchandise on Spreadshirt.com, he blogs, has over 100 videos on YouTube and you can follow him on Twitter. His concert calendar is online and if you can't make it to one of his shows, you can watch him online on UStream. To me he's simply the Piano Man 2.0.

And now you can enjoy a part of his next album, too! Check out his profile on Sellaband.com and feel free to invest in his work.

BTW, Sellaband is a social network, too: You can check out my profile and add me as your friend there, too. Then we can together check out other great artist and change the way the music industry works, just by Believing in the artists we like.

Matthew Ebel on SellaBand

: 7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:16:43 +0000

I recently got hit by a blogger virus Ponzi scheme meme tradition where you get to write about yourself while blaming others for it (thanks, Tim!). Well, I haven't blogged much about myself and I still owe you, dear reader, an "About me" article, but this blog is meant to be useful, not self-serving so you'll have to do with these seven pieces of useless information for now.

I used to be a nomad as a kid. My mom worked for the German department of foreign affairs which usually meant that every 4 years or so we would move to a different country. That's why she met my dad in Santiago de Chile and so the secret of my not so German last name "Gonzalez" is finally revealed. Despite all of that, I was born in Bonn, the former capital of Germany, we moved to Switzerland for a bit, I spent my kindergarten years in Bogotá (Colombia) (my brother was born there in 1975 and he can claim Columbian nationality by birthright, cool). I actually picked up Spanish as my first language with only little German (everybody including the TV was speaking Spanish so why should I have listened to my Mom?). From there we moved to Istanbul (Turkey) where I finally learned German (yep, there's a German school there) but halfway through the term, there was a minor terrorist bomb attack on my elementary school (I hardly noticed, really) so my parents had enough of foreign countries for a while and we moved back to Bonn around 1978. I spent most of my school time in Germany until we moved to Rome (Italy) after grade 9 (1986-ish). After finishing school, I went to Clausthal (Germany) (yes, quite a culture shock) to study computer-science while my parents and my brother continued to Lisbon (Portugal), Bonn (Germany, again), then Barcelona (Spain). Now I've been living in Munich for more than 10 years, so I call this "home" at the moment. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Chile, exploring my roots and I'm sure I'll go there again, someday...
As a student, I was CEO of a pub for a year. The pub is called the "Kellerclub" and it still exists :). You know how it goes: Your favourite student pub is actually a nonprofit organization for tax purposes so we could serve beer at the lowest prices in town. Any nonprofit needs to have a board of directors of at least three people and that night in, hmm 1992?, anyway, that night when they had to elect a new board, I volunteered together with two others and strangely noone else volunteered so the three of us got to run the pub for a year (in Germany, a nonprofit board has to have at least three members). While the other two members had to deal with financial bookeeping, booking the bands, etc., I mostly had to deal with legal issues (we got exorbitant high fees for social security for all the bands we booked over the last 5 years to deal with), fundraising (we needed new speakers) and trying to keep the bartenders under control so they don't drink more than they earn or close later than the police would let us. Oh, and keeping the school kids out of the club was always an issue, too... But it was fun and we learned more about real life than what the university could have taught us, especially during night after night of bartendering with all kinds of weird guests.
Tim blogged about playing around with mod files in his "7 things" entry, which reminds me of the good old homecomputer times. My first computer was a Dragon 32 which turned out to be a clone of the Radio Shack TRS 80 Color Computer. Back then, it wasn't as popular as the Commodore 64, but it had the better OS (read: More commands in its Basic interpreter). That didn't count much, because the C64 had the better games so I upgraded to a Commodore 128d after a few years. Those were the golden times of the SID sound chip and my friends and I spent hours, days, weeks and months listening to cool video game music (and of course playing those videogames, too) and watching breathtaking demos from the demoscene. Back then, you could know everything about your computer, including machine language, hardware registers (there were no "drivers" back then :) ) and the full specs (and undocumented features) of all of the chips inside your computer. I'd loved to program my own music, but somehow my musical talents were limited, and so I spent my time ripping music from games and figuring out how they worked. Then, the Amiga came and I earned my Amiga 500 by teaching my mom's staff how to use a word processor (they shipped PCs with Microsoft Word to the embassy where she worked, but did only one week of training for everything to a staff that never saw a computer before). The Amiga beat the PC world hands down in every category of coolness from audio to graphics to operating system features (multitasking, baby!) for years and of course its sound capabilities were more advanced (it had a real multi-channel sample player), but the SID had that analog touch that the digital world never could quite replicate that well back then. Just when the Amiga times were over (I owned an Amiga 4000 running NetBSD) and the PC won, I was saved from having to buy my first PC by deciding to play on a Sony Playstation console and working on an Apple Newton instead, which both outclocked all the PCs in my neighborhood by a wide margin :).
I still want to create music, but hardly find the time. I've played around with keyboards, but mostly preferred programming music using several software tools, such as Logic Pro. My biggest achievement so far is the intro music to the HELDENFunk podcast which I help create on a regular basis. It's not much, but at it doesn't seem to be bad either. At least noone has decided to replace it with a better tune yet :). I secretly wanted to become a drummer when I went to university, an ambition that was unexpectedly reignited during CEC 2008 when Glenn, Bob (?), Ted and I founded "They call me Ted" while playing Rockband in between CEC lectures. Our "band" reached the CEC 2008 highscore. We didn't win the final round (because none of us knew the song we were supposed to play), but we'll be back in 2009 and I'm now playing drums in Guitar Hero World Tour whenever I find the time as a practice. Back to real music: I'll start playing with Logic Pro again, this time trying to create a full song. And then there's the Korg Kaossilator which seems to be really cool, or perhaps I'll finally learn a real instrument like an electric guitar... Who knows?
During university times, I worked at the local cinema as a projectionist. Our projection room (to the right) looked remarkably similar to this photo from the Wikipedia article on projectionists. Back then, a projectionist had to do real work, such as splicing together 6 rolls of film (coming in boxes, no reels) into two reels (about one hour each) and manage the transition from one projector to the next during the show without the audience noticing too much. Of course a film would rip in the middle of the movie more often than not and then you had to run back to the projection room very quickly unless you wanted to spend the rest of the night trying to wind half a mile of film back onto the reel. I still keep a piece of film in my wallet as a lucky charm and occasionally I pull it out to show how the Dolby Pro-Logic, Dolby Digital, DTS and SDDS sound systems work on film. Today, I like tweaking my home cinema to get good audio and video quality and it's sad to see how bad the quality of cinemas have become as they spend less and less in getting image and audio quality right.
In the mid nineties, I ran my university's web server www.tu-clausthal.de and in 1997, I got hired by Sun to run the ARD webserver, (ARD is the biggest German public TV network), which back then was sponsored by Sun. I still was a student and I did it as a contractor for Sun, but that gave me a nice topic for my master thesis, a motivation to finish my studies and start working as an SE for Sun in 1998.
I like to make up funny, useless words. They just pop into my mind and I end up using them for stuff. Think something like "Gadonga". When my daughter Amanda was born, we said she looked like a cute little "Maus" (mouse in German). Well, the Spanish female diminuitive ending is "-ita", so we often call her now "Mausita". I hope she won't hate me for this when she reaches her teen age :).

Well, I hope this was not too boring, and I now get to tag 7 other people:

Rolf (@rolfk), who is currently enjoying Wall Street Journal fame,
Chaosblog (@chaosblog), who recently suffered from a similar food tagging experience,
Alec (@alecmuffett), who may or may not have done this before already,
Michael (@migowa), who publishes great photos,
Alpenglow (hey, you should twitter, too, you know?), who publishes more great photos,
Wolfgang (@stiefkind), my partner in crime for MUCOSUG and
Glenn (@gbrunett), the best guitarist I know (at least in Rockband and Guitar Hero :) ).

The rules:

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

: How to get Audio to work on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:32:19 +0000

My regular working environment on the go or when working from home is, of course, OpenSolaris. I've been using it on an Acer Ferrari Laptop for years now and I can say I'm very happy with it, and that's not just because I work for Sun.

Lately, I tried OpenSolaris on VirtualBox on my private MacBook Pro. This configuration turned out to work better than the native OpenSolaris on my company's Acer Ferrari laptop! Due to the MBP being 2 years newer and it having a dual-core CPU plus 4 GB of RAM, it turned out to be the better machine to host my OpenSolaris work environment.

With one exception: Audio.

Audio isn't enabled in VirtualBox by default in the Mac version and that has already been blogged elsewhere. The solution is simply to enable Audio in VirtualBox settings and select the Intel ICH AC97 soundchip.

Then, OpenSolaris doesn't come with an ICH AC97 audio driver and even the new SUNWaudiohd driver doesn't support it. The solution here is to download the OSS sound drivers from 4Front technologies. So far, so good.

But this didn't work for me: Either the sound would play for a few seconds, then hang, or the sound drivers wouldn't be recognized by GNOME/GStreamer at all, resulting in a crossed-out loudspeaker icon at the top! This is very frustrating if you want to show Brandan's excellent shouting video to an audience and have to switch out of OpenSolaris/VirtualBox back to Mac OS X just for that.

Apparently others suffered from the same annoyance, too, but neither of the solutions I found seemed to help: I installed and uninstalled and reinstalled the OSS drivers a number of times, ran the ossdevlinks script to recreate device links, even installed a newer, experimental version of the SUNaudiohd driver. No luck yet.

Then Frank, a Sun sales person who happens to use OpenSolaris on his laptop as well (Yay! a salesrep using OpenSolaris! Kudos to Frank!) suggested to uninstall the SUNWaudiohd driver, then install the OSS sound driver, which worked for him. It didn't occur to me that uninstalling SUNWaudiohd might be the solution, so I wanted to give it a try.

But, alas "pfexec pkg uninstall SUNaudiohd" didn't work for me either! Apparently there's a dependency between this package and the slim_install package bundle. Again, Google is your friend and it turned out to be a known bug that prevented me from uninstalling SUNWaudiohd. The workaround is simply to "pfexec pkg uninstall slim_install" which is no longer needed after the installation process anyway.

So lo and behold, gone is slim_install, gone is SUNWaudiohd, installed the OSS drivers, logged out and back in and audio works fine now! (Notice: no reboot required).

Here's the sweet and short way to audio goodness on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox:

Shutdown your OpenSolaris VirtualBox image if it is running, so you can change it's settings.
Activate audio for your OpenSolaris VM in VirtualBox. Select the ICH AC97 Chip. Here's a blog entry that describes the process.
Boot your OpenSolaris VirtualBox image.
Uninstall the slim_server package: "pfexec pkg uninstall slim_server"
Uninstall the SUNWaudiohd driver: "pfexec pkg uninstall SUNWaudiohd"
Download the OSS sound driver for OpenSolaris.
Install the OSS sound driver: "pfexec pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.1-1051-i386.pkg" (Or whatever revision you happened to download).
Log out of your desktop and log back in. Sound should work now.

: First Munich OpenSolaris User Group Meeting

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:24:43 +0000

Just as announced, we yesterday had our first Munich OpenSolaris User Group (MUCOSUG) meeting at the local Sun office, which is in Heimstetten near Munich.

We organized this meeting in cooperation with the local German Unix User Group's (GUUG) (thanks, Wolfgang!) SAGE monthly meeting. Normally, about 30 people would come to such meetings, so we were especially pleased to see over 40 people come to this event.

Photos of the meeting are available here. If you took some photos of your own, then just upload them to Flickr and tag them with "MUCOSUG". Yes, this somehow sounds like a nasal medicine, but hey, it's winter anyway and most people suffer from the cold, and besides, "MUC" is the official airline code for Munich, which is why the name was chosen.

In this meeting, we discussed OpenSolaris 2008.11 and due to popular demand, we also talked about VirtualBox. We also got to tour the Sun Solution Center which showcases Sun's hard- and software.

The presentation slides for OpenSolaris 2008.11 in German are provided here in ODP and PDF format, so are the ones from VirtualBox (PDF). Feel free to use them for your own purposes in case you want to do your own local OpenSolaris 2008.11 update. Thanks to Glynn for some of the slides!

Here is also Brendan's excellent video where he shouts at some disks, for your viewing pleasure. All made possible through the magic of OpenSolaris, DTrace and the Fishworks team who brought us the Sun Storage 7000 systems:

Our next task is to find a week of the month and day of the week for a regular meeting. We'll run a poll through the mailinglist soon, so make sure to sign up by sending mail to "ug-mucosug-subscribe at opensolaris dot org" if you want to attend our next meetings.

: Making 3D work over VNC

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:31:27 +0000

Dave recently played around with VNC on his computer and an iPod touch. While it worked surprisingly well, the achilles heel of many remote access solutions kicks in when you try doing some 3D stuff, such as a game, Second Life or maybe a scientific application.

This reminds me of one of the best kept secrets at Sun: We fixed the 3D-over-VNC problem.

Just check out the Sun Shared Visualization Software, it is free and based on open source packages and it works like a charm. For example, here is a picture of the ISC 2008 conference in Dresden where you see a molecular visualization program in 3D stereo at the LRZ booth in Dresden, which is actually running in Garching near Munich.

That's right, the server runs in Munich, the client is in Dresden, there's more than 400km air line in between (probably close to double that in terms of network line) and we saw close to 30 frames per seconds of intricate molecular modeling madness that we could manipulate interactively like if the server was around the corner. In this case, the "server" was a supercomputer that fills the halls of the LRZ compute center, so it wouldn't quite fit the showfloor, thus they used Sun Shared Visualization to deliver the images, not the whole supercomputer, to Dresden.

And this is an increasingly common theme in HPC: As data amounts get bigger and bigger (Terabytes are for sissies, it's Petabytes where the fun starts) and compute clusters get bigger and bigger (think rows of racks after racks), your actual simluation becomes harder to transport (a truck is still the cheapest, fastest and easiest way to transmit PB class data across the nation). The key is: You don't need to transport your data/your simulation/your research. You just need to show the result, and that is just pictures.

Even if it's 3D models at 30 frames per second (= interactive speed) with 1920x1080 pixels (= HDTV) each frame, that's only about 180MB per second uncompressed. And after some efficient compressing, it boils down to only a fraction of it.

This means that you can transmit HDTV at interactive speeds in realtime across a GBE line without any noticeable degradation of image quality, or if you're restricted to 100 MBits or less, you can still choose between interactive speeds (at some degradation of picture quality) or high quality images (at some sacrifice in speed) or a mixture (less quality while spinning, hold the mouse to get the nicer picture). And this is completely independent of the complexity of the model that's being computed at the back-end server.

The Sun Shared Visualization Software is based on VirtualGL and TurboVNC, which are two open source projects that Sun is involved in. It also provides integration with the Sun Grid Engine, so you can allocate multiple graphics cards and handle reservations like "I need 3 cards on Monday, 3-5 PM for my presentation" automatically.

So, if you use a 3D application running on Linux or Solaris and you want to have access to it from everywhere, check out the Sun Shared Visualization Software for free and let me know what you've done with it. Also, make sure to check out Linda's blog, she runs the developer team and would love to get some feedback on what people are using it for.

P.S.: There's some subtle irony in the LRZ case. If you check their homepage, their supercomputer has been built by SGI. But their remote visualization system has been built by Sun. Oh, and we now have some good supercomputer hardware, too.

: New OpenSolaris Munich User Group

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:57:17 +0000

Munich is one of the IT centers of Germany. Some would say, the IT center in Germany. Most popular IT and media companies are based here, including Sun Germany, and of course Bavaria has the reputation of being an important technology powerhouse for Germany, between Laptops and Lederhosen.

It was about time that a Munich OpenSolaris User Group be created, which Wolfgang and I just did.

So, if you love OpenSolaris and happen to be near Munich, welcome to the Munich Open Solaris User Group (MUCOSUG). Feel free to visit our project page, subscribe to the mailing list, watch our announcements or participate in our events.

As you can see above, we already have a logo. It shows a silhouette of the Frauenkirche church, which is a signature landmark of downtown Munich, with the Olympiaturm tower in the background. This is meant to symbolize the old and new features of Solaris, but let's not get too sentimental here... Let us know if you like it, or provide your own proposal for a better logo, this is not set in stone yet.

Our first meeting will be on January 12th, 2009, 7-11 PM (19:00-23:00) at the Sun Munich office near Munich, Germany. Check out some more information about this event, we're looking forward to meeting you!

: Chip Multi-Threading, Cooking and the Anatomy of a Viral Video

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:03:55 +0000

Here's a fun video about chip multi-threading, explained through cooking:

The Story

For those of you who don't speak German: Ingo, the hero of this movie, wants to cook German roulades. He uses his hands as registers, while his table serves as a level 1 cache. The instruction cache is his brain, where the recipe resides. Soon, he reaches the point at which it says: "Pour red wine into the pan". There's no red wine in the registers, no wine in the L1 cache, so he needs to ask his memory subsystem: "Hooooney, would you mind bringing me a bottle of Merlot from the basement, pleaaaase?"

While "honey", the memory subsystem, is busy bringing wine, Ingo explains that at this point, there's no difference whether he stirs the dish at 1.4 GHz, or at 4.5 GHz (this is the piece where his stirring gets frantic). Actually, he'd rather use his precious time to do other useful things with what he has in L1 cache already, for example cook dumplings, or prepare dessert. That would indeed help a lot in getting dinner ready sooner, even while waiting for "honey" to bring some wine.

And that is the whole point of chip multi-threading.

Now, imagine 8 Ingos, each with two hands (think pipelines) and doing 4 dishes per hand (read: threads). What a feast!

CMT Cooking Going Viral

I first saw Ingo giving this presentation in February, during Sun Germany's Partner University event. It was hilarious, the whole room was laughing and we knew he needed to do it again. So, with the help of a few people, Ingo and Ulrike created this fun video.

They posted it on YouTube in July and we featured it on one episode of the HELDENFunk podcast for German system admins. Soon, Ingo reached a few hundred downloads and we thought: "Cool, we have a new fun video to share!"

Then, Alex Wunschel, aka the "Podpimp", one of the more well-known podcasters in Germany and a listener of the HELDENFunk podcast, twittered about Ingo's memory subsystem called "Schatz!" (the German equivalent of "honey"). That was even cooler.

Then, Thomas Knüwer saw Alex' Tweet, and blogged about it. On the "Handelsblatt" blog. Think something like "Fortune" Magazine in German. And he got 14 comments. Gulp.

The result: Ingo's views skyrocketed, soon he was in the thousands, and last time I checked, he had more than 13,500 views, for a 3.5 minute video about chip multi-threading and a memory subsystem called "honey". Nice!

Today, Alec and I chatted about Ingo's video and apparently, he liked it very much. Well, I guess Ingo can start counting again. This time, english speaking viewers, too. Have fun!

Would you like Ingo to dub his video in English? Or do you prefer the German version? Just drop a comment below!

: BarCamp Munich 2008 - Enterprise 2.0, Open Source and the Future of Technology

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:14:27 +0000

I'm astonished to see that I haven't blogged for so long. Sorry to my readers, it's been some very busy times lately, and I hope I can write more in the coming weeks. I also owe an apology to the people that pointed out a bug with my ZFS replicator script and cron(1M), I'll look into it and make it my next post.

Barcamp at Sun in Munich

Yesterday, I attended Barcamp Munich 2008 which was sponsored by Sun (among other cool sponsors) and so it took place in the Sun Munich offices.

I was surprised to see that both sessions I proposed were accepted, plus one about Open Source Software at Sun that my colleague Stefan proposed with some support by me.

You can find a list of sessions for Saturday and Sunday on the web and it pays off to check back regularly, as the wiki is filling up with more and more collateral information around each track.

So, here's a roundup of session descriptions, slides and other links and materials for those of you who attended my sessions or could not attend, in chronological order.

Enterprise 2.0 - From Co-Workers to Co-Creators

This session was similar to the talk I did at Webkongress Erlangen a few months ago.

We had about 20 people in the room and quite a fruitful discussion on how to motivate employees to use new tools, how to guide employee behaviour and the challenges of opening up a company and making it more transparent.

Feel free to glance through my Enterprise 2.0 slides or read an earlier blog entry on a related subject. Also, check out Peter Reiser's blog, he has a number of great articles from behind the scenes of our SunSpace collaboration project.

Open Source Software at Sun

Stefan Schneider proposed a session about great software products that are available from Sun for free, as open source. We went through his list from least well-known to most popular.

Obviously, MySQL, StarOffice and OpenSolaris were at the end, but the more interesting software products were those that made the attendees go "Oh, I didn't know that!". One example of this category was Lightning, a rich calendar client.

Stefan recently posted his slides into the Sun Startups blog, thanks, Stefan!

The Future of Technology in 10, 20, 30 Years and More

This was a spontaneous talk that I offered after having seen the Barcamp Munich wishlist where people asked for a session on future technology developments, their effects on society and how one can cope with it.

I took some slides from a couple of earlier talks I did a while ago on similar topics and updated it for the occasion. The updated "Future of Technology" slidedeck is in German, but if enough people are interested, I can provide a translated version as well.

We started by looking at Moore's Law as an indicator of technology development. In "The Age of Spiritual Machines", Ray Kurzweil, a well-known futurist, pointed out that this law also holds for technology prior to integrated circuits, all the way down to Charles Babbage's difference engine of the 19th century.

With that in mind, we can confidently extend Moore's Law into the future, knowing that even if traditional chip technology ceases to deliver on Moore's Law, other technologies will pick up and help us achieve even higher amounts of computing power per amount of money/space/energy. Again, Kurzweil points out that if we compare the amount of computational power that one can purchase for $1000 for a given year with the complexity of all neurons of a brain and their connections to neighbouring neurons at their typical firing frequency, then the 2020s will be an interesting decade.

Key technologies of the future will be: Genetics and Biotechnology, Robotics and Nanotechnology.

We watched a fascinating video about Molecular Visualizations of DNA (here's a longer, more complete version) that made us witnesses of DNA being replicated, right before our eyes, at a molecular level. It's amazing to see how mechanical this process looks, almost like industrial robots grinding away on ribbons of DNA, cutting pieces, replicating them, then splicing them back in. In the near future, we will see personalized medicine, based on our own DNA, and optimized for our individual needs as well as novel applications of biotechnology for clean energy, new materials and the assembly of early molecular machines.

Robotics are another fascinating area of technology and we're seeing more and more robots enter our day to day life. Industrial and military robots may be an "old hat", but did you know that today, millions of households are already using robots to vacuum their floory, mow their lawns or perform other routine work? And we will see many more robots in the future, I'm sure. Meanwhile, I'm happy to say that my Roomba robot indeed saves a lot of precious time while fulfilling my natural geeky desire for cool gadgetry.

Finally, Nanotechnology will open up a new category of advanced technology that will affect all aspects of human life, the environment and the world. We watched a vision of a future nanofactory that fits onto a common desk and is capable of manufacturing an advanced laptop with 100 hours of battery life and a billion CPUs. But nanotechnology can do much more: Highly efficient solar cells, clean water, lightweight spacecrafts, nanobots that clean up your bloodstream, more advanced versions of your organs, brain implants and extensions, virtual reality that is indistinguishable from real reality and much more.

Check out the Foresight Institute's introduction to nanotechnology for more information about this fascinating topic, including a free PDF download of K. Eric Drexler's book "Engines of Creation". Real engineers will probably want to take a look at his textbook "Nanosystems Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation"

One controversial topic when discussing the future is the Technological Singularity. This is the point in time, where artificial intelligence becomes powerful enough to create new technology on its own, thereby accelerating the advancement of technology without human intervention. A discussion of this topic can be found in Kurzweil's newest book "The Singularity is Near".

Another great way to think about the future is to read Stefan Pernar's sci-fi thriller "Jame5 - A Tale of Good and Evil". This book starts in the best Michael Crichton style and then becomes a deep and thoughtful discussion around the philosophy of the future, when mankind confronts the powers of strong AI. You can buy the book or just download the PDF for free. Highly recommended.

One of my favourite citations is said to be an old chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Many thanks to all the people that I met during, or attended my sessions at, Barcamp Munich 2008, it was a most interesting event.

Edit (Oct., 13th): Meanwhile, a few blog reactions are rolling in: Dirk wrote a nice summary on the Enterprise 2.0 session (in German) while Ralph summarized the Future technology session (German as well). I found them through Markus' Barcamp Munich 2008 session meta entry. Thanks to all! Also, Stefan has posted his slides from the open source talk, see above.

Edit (Oct. 14th): Here are some more notes from Stefan Freimark (in German). Thank you!

: POFACS Podcast: Home Servers are quickly becoming Commonplace

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:14:36 +0000

I remember having talked at a conference 3 years ago and predicting that home servers are going to become a central part of most people's homes. Today, this would not be a surprise, but back then, running a server at home was really only for computer geeks.

Now, the entertainment industry gives us many home server alternatives to choose from: Add 50-100 EUR to a USB disk's price, and you'll get a built in server that offers the space to your local network through SMB, NFS or other protocols. Microsoft has discovered this, too and they're busily debugging their Windows Home Server products. UPnP has emerged as a standard for driving audio/video components over the network from servers, be they beefed up USB disks or some machine running some OS with some server component or a real dedicated home server machine. If you use iTunes and enable the "sharing" piece, you're already running a home server.

Of course, this is all driven by clients. First, people imported their music from CDs into their computers so they could listen on the go and fill their MP3 players. Then, they discovered that running a PC or even a laptop in your living room to listen to your music isn't really cool and lacks that WAF that makes or breaks most living room decisions. Soon, specialized living room clients started to pop up, such as the Roku Soundbridge or the Logitech SqueezeBox. Digital TV set-top-boxes and PVRs like the DreamBox were also early adopters of the home network by either offering TV streams on the network or using network attached storage for storing recorded TV shows. And the current generation of game consoles comes with Wifi and/or wired networking as a central part of their strategy, and they make good network media players as well. Even the traditional vendors of home entertainment equipment such as TVs, Hifi systems etc. have started to adopt some way of accepting digital audio and/or video from the network for A/V Receivers, DVD-Players, TVs etc. My current favourite, for example is the Linn Sneaky Music DS. And I applaud them for boldy migrating their records business to the digital world, in full studio master quality. You can even buy their full music catalog pre-installed on a 2TB NAS storage appliance, including UPnP server!

The current edition of the POFACS Podcast (sorry, it's in German) talks about the various ways a home server can add value to your living room experience, from serving files to your family's laptops, being a backup repository to the more interesting topics of serving music for dinner in a WAF-friendly way or handling your TV recordings over the net so you don't have to worry about noisy PCs and harddisks sitting in your living room. Enjoy!