DTrace

I so much regret that the course I'm running today is not on Solaris 10 (but Solaris 9).
We are running on what appears to be a totally idle system, dedicated to training, with no heavy applications even installed, let alone running.
There is 9 of us, doing things that any ordinary script writer would do (you guessed it - it's a shell scripting course). That does not include putting the system under any big strain.
Yet for some 10-15 minutes this morning the system was running visibly slower. The server is in London, we are not. We don't have access to root either. So we have all of the standard tools: ps, prstat, uptime, and few more, but none of them managed to pinpoint what was going wrong. And then it sorted itself out.
We could only assume there was some background task running, doing some system maintenance stuff (at 11AM though ?), generating LOADS of very short-lived tasks that ordinary diagnostic tools couldn't register. I wished I had DTrace available!
Mind you - I have learned a bit more about prstat today...

Just a few thoughts...

It's gone quiet for a while - been teaching a lot, and doing a course update during the spare moments. The Solaris 10 work has gone onto back burner for the moment, but will have the prominent place soon, again.

I have a day-long seminar on Solaris vs. Linux approaching - and need to do the write up for that. My understanding of Solaris 10 is much better now, and it's interesting to notice how diverse is the take on it from the users/industry.

Just done some work on Solaris 10 at the customer's site - and here they embraced it fully. They have containers and zones working (with several development projects running their own distinct and fully customised environments), and the new SMF sub-system is now well understood (nobody crying for inetd or rc scripts anymore). And even though the lack of some of the promised features (the new filesystem and Janus, the Linux environment) is a big disappointment to everybody, on the whole Sol10 gets the thumbs up!

On the other hand, I have come across people saying that this is the end of Solaris (??!!??), others saying that is the end of Linux. Well, as usual, the future will show, but I'm convinced that this is the end of neither - they will just both have to keep up to date. There is nothing like a bit of healthy competition!

What this proves, though, is that the new features of S10 scare many people. Hmmm - that calls for education and training ;-)

Good for you, Amazon

Bought a book on Solaris 10 on the Amazon. Needed it, because I wanted to see the formal take on all these new features. Guess what! None of them covered. A blatant example of the reference book released with just a name change. There are some references to Solaris 10, but the description of the book is basically a totally wrong !

For the first time ever, I have left a review. I then decided to also write to Amazon directly, to ask if and what control they have over these kind of issues, since - to my mind, this infringes trade description act.

Well, got an e-mail from Amazon, less than 24 hours later, to say that they will take the book off.

I'm well impressed!