Here is a heads up that we are seeing the online backup application Carbonite, put out by the company of the same name, bundled with a Java update. If you aren’t careful, when you click through the Java update installer, you get Carbonite and a 30 day trial subscription to the service. Not sure if the trial subscription is automatic or if that’s an extra step. Now, I am not saying anything bad or good about Carbonite, I haven’t ever used the service (naturally I prefer MYfilesanywhere), but any time an application gets installed automagically without my express consent, it sets off a red flag in my book.
Category Archives: Tech News
Latest Solaris 10 Patch Cluster Is Broken
Thought I would share this with anyone out there that manages Solaris 10 servers. In my case we were working with Sparc, but x86 might be affected as well. I’ll skip all of the gory details, but basically what we ran into was a problem with the dependency matrix for a kernel patch (I believe the patch number is 141414–07). What does that mean, you ask? Well, it means that the kernel patch got applied via the patch cluster install script, but without the requisite dependencies being satisfied. Yeah, ouch.
The servers in question would then panic as soon as you tried to bring them back up, and I mean panic hard. You couldn’t even get into single user mode. We spent hours on the phone with Sun support (this is where we finally found out about the dependency problem) to no avail. Sun has really gone downhill in the last few years, and pretty much like a rock since Oracle bought them. Their answer was that they can’t test everything and we had to figure it out on our own. Yikes, what are we paying for support for again???
We ended up having to go back and restore from tape, but since we couldn’t boot into single user mode we did the old net boot from the jumpstart server trick and then restore from tape. All in all it was not fun, but we made it through it. One last thing, we had some servers that were OK with the patch cluster. I think it depends on the release of Solaris that you are running. The older installs did not have the proper dependencies, but the newer installs did. I just wanted to put this out there as a heads up for anyone else getting ready to patch up a Solaris 10 box, be careful cause you might make a brick.
Hope that helps!
Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems
Or, the end of the tech world as we know it. Maybe that’s too harsh, time will tell. I know one thing for sure, Oracle stepped up with an offer that was only $400 million more than IBM was tossing around (I know, “only”, but when you are talking $7+ billion it’s not so much), and I bet IBM is now pretty mad at themselves. Not just because they let Sun get away, but more importantly because Oracle with all of Sun’s technology under their belt, just became a veritable behemoth competitor.
I can’t say that Oracle buying Sun is worse than IBM buying Sun, I think either would have been bad, but I do think that IBM would have made more of the technology that Sun has, especially in the hardware arena. Most people already run Oracle on Sun, but I think Oracle was angling the software more than the hardware. Now they have the whole “stack” sewn up. They have been re-branding Red Hat Linux to provide “their own” operating system, but now they don’t have to because they really do have their own operating system with Solaris. One that lots of people prefer for running Oracle versus Linux and especially Windows. Now Oracle can provide the application, the database, the operating system and the hardware platform to run it all on, all in one nice bundle. I have come to think of it as the “O-Stack”. Now, instead of a LAMP stack, Oracle will be pushing their O-Stack.
I just hope that the folk out there that have a considerable investment in Sun (me included), not only in SPARC, but also their X86 line, didn’t just get screwed. Can Oracle keep the support going? Will they keep the hardware lines going? What will happen to Solaris, MySQL and Java (to name a few)? Only time will tell, but I for one am not pleased with this announcement.
I’ll have more updates as I find information to share.
Palm Gets It’s Ego Pump Fired Up
Well now, it appears that the folks at Palm seem to think that they have the next big thing, an iPhone killer if you will. It seems like everytime some company says that it always comes back to bite them in the buttocks later, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Specifically, Palm comes out saying some crazy things like the following:
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
Whew, and even my favorite:
“All iPhone Customers Will Switch to Pre this Summer”
Heck yeah, that’s quite the bold statement there Palm. We’ll see how that one pans out. Check out the whole article if you want more info. Me personally, I still prefer my Blackberry.
Sun Microsystems Drops SPARC Chip
OK, I admit that headline is a bit misleading, but it’s also true. I spend time regularly working in an environment that is all Solaris UNIX running on SPARC chips, therefore we use SPARC based Sun Blade workstations exclusively. This means that the platform we use to manage and develop on is the same as the platform we manage, which is a good thing when you are dealing with hundreds of mission critical servers.
I was speaking to one of my Sun contacts, enquiring about some workstations when I was informed that Sun has now dropped all Sun Blade workstations based on the SPARC chip. You will only be able to buy workstations with Intel or AMD (x86) processors.
What!? I personally think that’s stupid, and it puts me in a bind. Before you flame, I know why they did it. The SPARC workstations are expensive and I am sure they don’t sell very many so they decided it was more economical to stop making them altogether. And yes, I know I can run Solaris x86, but why would I want to introduce a whole new architecture just for managing my existing systems?
Either way you slice this, I think it is a sign of the times. Quality and performance will give way to cheap. I read articles on the Web about how solaris is slow and the SPARC chip “sucks” because it “only” goes up to 1.5GHz or so when Intel goes over 3Ghz. That just makes me smile because it just shows how little people know about how things work.
When you get right down to it, I guess it all comes down to money.
Heads Up! Microsoft’s DNS Patch and ZoneAlarm Don’t Play Well
It appears that if you are running Windows XP Service Pack 3 and using ZoneAlarm firewall software, when you install patch KB951748 (MS08-037) that came out yesterday’s “patch Tuesday” bunch, it breaks ZoneAlarm. You cannot access the Internet until you either uninstall the patch or turn off ZoneAlarm. This patch is related to the DNS poisoning exploit that came out recently, so it should be applied. What to do? Well, one suggested workaround (other than the two mentioned above) was to lower the security settings to medium in ZoneAlarm. At least then you don’t have to disable it entirely. Another suggested fix has been to leave ZoneAlarm at High and set the Internet Security Zone to Custom and add the following rule “Allow outgoing TCP Ports:80,443”. I cannot verify that these fixes work, I don’t use ZoneAlarm myself, but others hit by this problem have had success with them.
Here is the Microsoft link with information about the patch:
http://www.microsoft.com/ … /ms08-037.mspx
Here is the official link from ZoneAlarm about the problem:
http://download.zonealarm.com/ … /LossOfInternetAccessIssue.html