This question came up on the solarisx86 yahoogroup recently:What about a patch for a large package, say the video drivers. Might some files patched in an earlier release not have needed further patching and thus have been skipped over by applying the most current release? So if you apply say rev-03 of a patch are you getting all the fixes from -01 and -02 also? The answer is yes. All patch revisions are cumulative so Read more
The following press release has just been issued by Shamrock Rovers F.C. It touches on some of the points I made in my last post, and its good to see the club officially responding to allegations made recently by some journalists. Shamrock Rovers and the Tallaght Community Stadium ShamrockRovers is refuting recent unfounded and unjustifiable comments in the press relating to the club and the Tallaght Community Stadium. "There has been some blatantly untrue and Read more
Live Upgrade is a technology in Solaris that allows you to easily upgrade a system while not risking change to your running environment. You can easily revert back to your previous environment if you need to. BigAdmin has a great guide on setting up Live Upgrade. I’ve mentioned before about the problems of patching live systems. With the latest Solaris 10 KU for example most of the effort went into crafting the patch scripts so Read more
A wile ago some of our test suites were failing due to erroneous requests to port 80 on the test machines. The simplest thing to do was to just block requests to anything other than our webserver in the lab using ipfilter. pass in quick on bge2 proto tcp from any to <webserver IP> port = 80 block in quick on bge2 from any to any port = 80 bge2 is our external interface. The bit Read more
Some of the regulars from geocachingireland.com were featured doing what they do best on RTE’s Nationwide TV Programme tonight. The 7 minute clip from the programme is on the Nationwide website. Read more
When I did an interview for my current job in Sun I was asked what I didn’t like about the company. Having been the sysadmin for some machines in college I hated Suns security patching policy. A vulnerability would be posted to bugtraq and the students would soon start trying to exploit the vulnerability. Some source code patch would come out for other OS’s but the best you would get from Sun was a workaround. Read more
The Patch System Test lab, like many other labs, has a mixture of different machines, some with different means of connecting up the serial console to them. The older Sun boxes have 25 pin connectors, some others have 9 pin serial connectors, and newer machines have RJ45 connectors. For the most part people will use some sort of terminal server for getting the consoles on these machines. To get the console you basically need to Read more
Ah the participation age! Here (live!) at the IFAS stand at the Connacht Star Party we have nearly live 3D images from Mars. Midnight Mars Browser is Java application that can download images from the two Nasa rovers on Mars. So we downloaded images from the surface for the past couple of days, some of which were taken only hours previously. And they were in 3D. We run the risk of making 3D glasses popular Read more
I had a bit of a cold this weekend, so didn’t leave the house much. In fact I didn’t leave my bed much. To pass the time I decided to learn Java. As you do. First stop was netbeans.org to download the IDE. I could have just started writing the code in vi but I wanted to see if these IDE’s are as cool as people tell me. After running through the quickstart guide I Read more
A colleague of mine made an interesting comment today while we were getting a cup of tea. (We drink lots of tea in Patch Test, possibly because there is a big whiteboard near the kettle, or rather a kettle near a big whiteboard somewhere other than a meeting room…) Anyway, the comment was about the future of patching now that ZFS is alive. One thing that ZFS allows you to do is manage snapshots of Read more