Sun Strangeness

I'm currently watching the webcast of Jonathon Schwartz's recent product announcement. What's particularly interesting is that he claims that Solaris is being run mostly on Dell hardware now, not on Sun hardware. The next two most popular platforms for Solaris are HP and IBM. Sun's own hardware is forth in popularity for running Solaris.

Conversely, from other sources I've heard that of the x64 hardware that Sun sells, 80% of it is used to run OSes other than Solaris.

It's not completely clear to me what this all means, but I'm not sure that is good.

On the bright side, Sun's new products look excellent, especially Thumper. Forty-eight hot-swappable 500GB hard drives plus a four core NFS server, all in one 4U rack-mount enclosure. I'll take two!

Dolphins

"Dolphins have a massive new brain area, the paralimbic lobe, that we do not possess. The paralimbic lobe is an outgrowth of the cingulate gyrus, which is known to elaborate social communication and social emotions (such as feelings of separation distress and maternal intent) in all other mammals. Thus, dolphins may have social thoughts and feelings that we can only vaguely imagine."

-- Jaak Panksepp in "Affective Neuroscience", Oxford University Press, 1998, referenced from Steven Johnson's "Mind Wide Open" and quoted by Nick Papadakis in a post to qotd.

Welcome to |>oug's Tech Blog

I've decided to submit to peer pressure and start my own tech blog. It seems that no self-respecting software engineer can be without one these days. And Google's Blogger seems as good a hosting site as any. So, for my first entry, as a great show of originality, I will steal the contents of an email that was posted today to the BBLISA mailing list:


From: "Paul Beltrani"
Subject: [BBLISA] Re: OSS Statistics and trend reporting for Linux/Solaris

On 6/12/06, Paul Beltrani wrote:
> Does anyone have suggestions for
> open-source solutions to track server
> utilization of Linux and possibly Solaris
> hosts? ...

Thank you everyone for your replies. To recap:

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SNMP/RRDTool/MRTG

RRDTool - Round Robin Database
A system to store and display time-series data.
http://www.rrdtool.org/
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

MRTG - Multi Router Traffic Grapher
Retrieves stats via SNMP and generates HTML with graphs of that data over time.
Works stand alone or with RRDTool
http://www.mrtg.org/
http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

Cacti
Front end to RRDTool and MRTG
http://cacti.net/
(I hadn't seen this one before. Thanks Alfred.)

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Nagios:
Very powerful monitoring systems. Does much more than just gather stats.
http://www.nagios.org/

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Orca
Plots data from text files to HTML pages. Works in conjunction with
data gathering scripts, orcallator (Solaris), procallator (Linux).
http://www.orcaware.com/