The Tribblix live ISO and related images are put together every so slightly differently in the latest m34 release.All along, there's been an overlay (think a group package) called base-iso that lists the packages that are present in the live image. On installation, this is augmented with a few extra packages that you would expect to be present in a...

With OpenSolaris and derivatives such as illumos, we gained the ability to build a whole IT infrastructure in a single box, using virtualized networking (crossbow) to build the underlying network and then attaching virtualized systems (zones) atop virtualized storage (zfs).Some of this was present in Solaris 10, but it didn't have crossbow so the n...

While a bit under the weather last week, I decided to try and fix what at first glance appears to be a simple problem:need to ship the manpage with exaNow, exa is a modern file lister, and the package on Tribblix doesn't ship a man page. The reason for that, it turns out, is that there isn't a man page in the source, but you can generate one.To bui...

On the Solaris 10 Platinum Beta program, one of the most exciting promised features was ZFS, the new file system.I was especially interested, given that I was in a data-heavy position at the time. The limits of UFS were painful, we had datasets into several terabytes already - and even the multiterabyte file system support that got added was actual...

The current Tribblix website is a bit of a hack. Technically it's using a static site generator - a simple home-grown script that constructs pages from a bit of content and boilerplate - but I wanted to be able to go a bit further.I looked at a few options - and there are really a huge number of them - such as Hugo and Zola. (Both are packaged for ...

Sadly, the trick described below won't work in current releases of Solaris, or any of the illumos distributions. But back in the day, it was pretty helpful.In Solaris 10, we had sparse root zones - which shared /usr with the global zone, which not only saved space because you didn't need a copy of all the files, but creating them was much quicker b...

One of the slightly unusual features in illumos, and Solaris because that's where it came from, is isaexec.This facility allows you to have multiple implementations of a binary, and then isaexec will select the best one (for some definition of best).The full implementation allows you to select from a wide range of architectures. On my machine it'll...

I spent a little time yesterday updating MATE on Tribblix, to version 1.26.This was supposed to be part of the "next" release, but we had to make an out of sequence release for an illumos security issue, so everything gets pushed back a bit.Updating MATE is actually fairly easy, though. The components in MATE are largely decoupled, so can be update...

The original big ticket feature in Solaris 10 was Zones, a simple virtualization technology that allowed a set of processes to be put aside in a separate namespace and be under the illusion that this was a separate computer system, all under a single shared kernel.As a result of this sleight of hand, you could connect to a zone using ssh (or, remem...

I've just released Tribblix m26 for SPARC.The release history on SPARC looks a little odd - m20, m20.6, m22, m25.1, and now m26. Do these release versions mean anything?Up to and including m25.1, the illumos commit that the SPARC version was built from matched the corresponding x86 release. This is one reason there might be a gap in the release tra...

I run Tribblix on AWS, and make some AMIs available. They're only available in London (eu-west-2) by default, because that's the only place where I use them, and it costs money to have them available in other regions. If you want to run them elsewhere, you can copy the AMI.It's not actually that difficult to create the AMIs, once you've got the han...

There was a huge amount of resistance early on to the fact that zfs didn't have an fsck. Or, rather, a separate fsck.I recall being in Sun presentations introducing zfs and question after question was about how to repair zfs when it got corrupted.People were so used to shoddy file systems that were so badly implemented that a separate utility was n...

I seem to have just missed the anniversary, but it turns out that Tribblix has existed for slightly over a decade.The initial blog post on Building Tribblix was published on October 24th, 2012. But the ISO image (milestone 0) was October 21st, and it looks like the packages were built on October 4th. So there's a bit of uncertainty about the actual...

Many, many years ago I worked on a prototype of a software ecosystem I called TREASURE - The Remote Execution and Access Service Users Really Enjoy.At the time, I was running the infrastructure and application behind an international genomics service. The idea was that we could centrally manage all the software and data for genomic analysis, provid...

Following hot on the heels of the Tribblix Milestone 22 ISO for SPARC, it's possible to upgrade that to a newer version. The new version that's available is m25.1.(If the available versions look a bit random, that's because they are. Not every release on x86 was built for SPARC, and not all of the ones that were actually worked properly. So we have...

I've made available a newer ISO image for Tribblix on SPARC.This is an m22 ISO. So it's actually relatively old compared to the mainstream x86 release.I actually had a number of random SPARC ISO images, but for a while I've had no way of testing any of them. (And many of the problems with the SPARC ISOs in general is because I had no real way of te...

I wrote about one way in which HR and IT can operate more closely, but there's another interaction between IT and HR that might not be so benign.DevOps is ultimately about breaking down silos in IT (indeed, my definition of DevOps is as a cultural structure where teams work together to meet the needs of the business rather than competing against ea...

A while ago I mentioned The three strands of Information Technology, and how this was split into an internal-facing component (IT for the business, IT for the employee) and external-facing (IT for the customer).In a pure technology company, there's quite a mismatch, with the customer-facing component being dominant and the internal-facing parts bei...

A while ago, I wrote about deploying Tribblix on Digital Ocean.The good news is that the same process works flawlessly with the recently released m28 Tribblix release.If you recall from the original article, adding an additional storage volume didn't work. But, we now have a vioscsi driver, so has the situation improved?Yes!All I did was select an ...

I've just made available the m27 AMIs for Tribblix. As usual, these are just available in London (eu-west-2).One thing I've noticed repeatedly while running illumos on AWS is that network stability isn't great. The instance will occasionally drop off the network and stubbornly refuse to reclaim its IP address even if you reboot it. It's not just Tr...

This was originally a twitter thread, this is a more permanent expanded version.When support for Solaris and SPARC was removed from Java, the code that was removed fell into a number of distinct classes, not all of which are equally valuable.Solaris platform supportFirst, there's the support for Solaris (and thus illumos) as an operating system (th...

One of the scourges of corporate life was the forced monthly password change. As anyone who understands security will know, this was always a terrible idea - it leads to a culture of passwords that are weak, formulaic, and written down.Another, more widespread scourge, is the use of devious complexity requirements.Fortunately, the world is changing...

Last week I went to Cloud Expo Europe at ExCeL.(Yes, there was a tube strike. No, that didn't affect me much. Had to walk from London Bridge Station to Tower Gateway to get to the DLR, but walking past HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge, and the Tower of London isn't such an imposition.)Now, "Cloud Expo" is the umbrella event. There are a number of co-locat...

One good thing to have happened recently is the rise of Let's Encrypt, bringing https to all websites without all the hassle you previously had to go through to get a certificate.One not quite so good event recently was the switch by Let's Encrypt to certificates signed by their own ISRG X1 root, and more excitingly the expiry of the prior DST Root...

How do zones actually get put together on Solaris and illumos? Specifically, how does a zone get installed? There are various type of zones. The nomenclature here is a brand. A zone's brand defines how it gets installed and managed and its properties. Often, this is mapped to a zone template which is the default configuration for a zone of that typ...

One way to judge the health or strength of a product might be to look at the ecosystem surrounding that product. But is this diagnostic? Note that there are several concepts here that are similar to the ecosystem. I'm not referring to the community, those people who might use or support the product. Nor am I talking about a marketplace, which is a ...

How are IT departments structured? I've seen a variety of ways to do this. It depends on the individual business, but over the years I've come up with a way to think about this.When thinking about Information Technology (IT), it naturally splits into 3 separate strands:IT for the businessThis is the provision of facilities for HR, Finance, Sales, a...

Putting your IT infrastructure into the cloud seems to be the "in" thing. It's been around for a while, of course. And, like most things related to IT, there are tradeoffs to be made.My rough estimate is that the unit cost of provisioning a service on AWS is about 3 times that of a competent IT organization providing a similar service in house. Oth...

Back in 2019, a new JEP (JDK Enhancement Proposal) appeared. JEP 362: Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC PortsOf course, for those of us running Solaris or illumos (which is the same platform as far as Java is concerned), this was a big deal. Losing support for a major language on the platform was potentially a problem.The stated reason for removal wa...

A relatively recent feature offered by Digital Ocean is the ability to deploy your own custom image. So, can I deploy a Tribblix image to Digital Ocean?Short answer: Yes!For the process, read on.I'm using Bhyve to create the image. This is a slight variation on the Installing Tribblix in Bhyve on Tribblix procedure.The basic process looks like this...

For the latest release, I've made a couple of tweaks to the Tribblix ISO image.The first is that it's now a hybrid ISO. So you should be able to write it (simply dd it) to a USB stick and use that to boot. I've never managed to both create and test a usb image, so this should be a win.The hybrid ISO also boots under bhyve, which the old ISO never d...

You can run a slightly old version of Eclipse on illumos. The download is here.Later Eclipse (and SWT) versions didn't have Solaris support. Or any unix variant such AIX or HPUX either, or certain hardware platforms, come to that.However, if you try and run that eclipse on current Tribblix or OpenIndiana, you'll find it doesn't work and you get a J...

A while ago, I wrote about booting Tribblix on Vultr using iPXE.Naturally, the question arises - is this possible for other illumos distributions, like OmniOS?First, though, a note about why this might be interesting. Imagine I have some servers in a remote datacenter, and I need to install an OS. Most servers have some sort of remote managamenet c...

I'm a fan of the cloud. Honest. Providing someone else is paying for it, that is, given how ridiculously expensive it is.But running stuff in the cloud is a whole lot easier for me. Someone else fixing hardware and infrastructure is a big win. No more driving to the datacenter at 3 in the morning. No more wandering into a room that's baking at 70C ...

I wrote a while back about installing Tribblix on Vultr using iPXE.That all still works perfectly with the m23.2 release. And it's pretty quick too. It's even quicker on the new "High Frequency" servers, that appear to be a 3.8GHz Skylake chip and NVME storage.One of the snags with many of the smaller cloud providers is that they don't necessarily ...

It's been a funny year, has 2020.But amongst all this, work on Tribblix continues.I released milestone 22 back in March. That was a fairly long time in the making, as the previous relase was 9 months earlier. Part of the reason for the lengthy delay was that there wasn't all that much reason for a new release - there are a lot of updated packages, ...

One of the interesting capabilities of Solaris zones was the ability to run older versions of Solaris than that in the global zone. Marketing managed to mangle this into Containers, and it was supported for Solaris 8 and Solaris 9.I used this extensively on one project, to lift a whole datacenter of ancient (yes, really ancient) Sun servers into zo...

I use AWS to run illumos quite a bit, either with Tribblix or OmniOS.Creating EC2 instances with the console is fine for one-offs, but gets a bit tedious. So using the AWS CLI offers a better route, with the ec2 run-instances command.Yes. there are things like templates and terraform and all sorts of other options. For whatever reason, they don't w...

In the prior article in this series, I discussed how to build illumos-gate (and it applies to illumos-omnios too), using a Tribblix AMI on AWS.After that, you'll have two directories of interest under illumos-gate.The proto area, specifically proto/root_i386, that is a fully installed copy of illumos.Under packages, an on-disk IPS package respoitor...

While messing about with illuminate, I noticed an interesting oddity in the disk display:See on the end of the product string is that "Revision"? That shouldn't be there, and iostat -En doesn't show it. This comes from my JKstat code, so where have I gone wrong?This comes from the sderr kstat, which is a named kstat of the device_error class.A name...

Using etcd to store configuration data is a common pattern, so how might you set up an etcd cluster on Tribblix?Updated: With current etcd, you may need to add the --enable-v2=true flag, as shown below. For example, Patroni requires v2. I'll start by creating 3 zones to create a 3-node cluster. For testing these could all be on the same physical sy...