Why does the Pope have an Astronomer

I dont usually put up non computing topics, but since this talk is well worth attending… We are delighted to announce that we have got the well known and eminent Guy Consolmagno to give us our talk next Thursday in Gonzaga. Guy is speaking at Whirlpool in Birr which begins on the Friday after our meeting and with the help and influence of Gonzaga he has kindly consented to come a day early and give Read more

First Irish OpenSolaris UsersGroup Meeting

Hi, Thanks to Jamie O’Leary of DIT Netsoc we have a venue available for the first Irish OpenSolaris meeting. So, the time and venue DIT, Bolton St., Rm 259 @ 6:30, Tuesday 27th Sept Primary Speaker Darren Moffat, Solaris Security Architect and then a general discussion on what people would like to get out of the UG. Further details and directions for the exact location in DIT will be sent out before the UG meeting. Read more

El reg on Solaris

The Rgister has a very interesting article on Solarisx86 today Sun’s Linux killer shows promise The article is a very good read and points to some things that need working on however in one paragraph the author discussed Solaris Patching, and I’d like to elaborate on that a bit. This is an area where Sun’s commitment to the x86 project, and the extent to which it intends to build a community around it, will show. Read more

Replacing sudo

Recently I was installing a machine for someone. One of their requirements was to have sudo installed. Sudo, allows a given set of users to run a given set of commands as root. What this user wanted to use sudo for was so that they could use any command as root except halt, shutdown,reboot & init. So rather than using it as a security device they were using it as a device to stop themselves Read more

Finally I have a useable solaris laptop

Some time ago I posted about what I had needed to do to get Solaris installed on my laptop. Well, the install went fine, but rather what extra bits I needed. Some folks in Sun have been working on a driver for the centrino wireless adapter, but up to now I’ve never managed to get it working. This was pissing me off, so I decided to look into the problem properly. The root of the Read more

Solaris 10 patches and SunUpdate

Are downloadble from http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=patches/zos-s10 As was pointed out on comp.unix.solaris there are no clusters available yet. One tool that you might like to try for patch management on Solaris 10 is the new Sun Update tool. It will check for the latest updates and can be used on all your solaris boxes to keep them up to date or to keep them up to a state defined by sets of rules. It is maintained from Read more

Updating Software in the Open World

Opensolaris.org is go. Go register! Although I don’t write code for solaris I can share Bryan’s sentiments about it feeling like your hometown getting flooded by tourists. And wasn’t there a good job done of making the town nice for you all! I work in patch testing, and over the past few years I have seen a lot of ‘interesting’ problems with updating products. As such I thought I would have my first opensolaris post Read more

Minor gotcha for creating multiple zones

I recieved a new test machine on Friday, and being too lazy to set any particular tests running on it to burn it in I decided to just leave it running over the weekend creating as many zones as it could. Today I came in to discover that only 255 zones were created. The error message on booting the 256th was bash-3.00# zoneadm -z rodent-z256 boot zoneadm: zone ‘rodent-z256’: eri0: could not add interface: No Read more

Patch Testing

Fintan mentioned a register article in which Oracle are concerned about the interdependencies of linux patches. This is something that used to frustrate me no end while I used Debian, where apt-getting the latest package of something resulted in having to download an often large number of seemingly unrelated packages. Discussing Suns patch dependency logic is something worth of a post on its own, but for now I’d like (at Fintans prodding!) to discuss system Read more