that’s whacked

ooto

Saturday, Dec 24. 2005  –  Category: Musings, OpenSolaris

fyi, i’ll be going up to the slopes for a few days, and then gone for a couple of weeks of vacation to thailand & malaysia, so i won’t be very responsive or updating my blog much.

i’ve got most of the build 30 delivery done, just waiting for some review - and kupfer should be making the delivery. if you have any OpenSolaris questions while i’m gone, please direct them to the discussions.

have a great holiday!

subversion: all or none?

Friday, Dec 23. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

i think i’ve got the incremental “squelch”-ing working now, so i can maintain a per-putback squelched workspace that mirrours ON. this puts us one step closer to being able to do nightly source syncs.

my next step is to somehow mirrour this over to Subversion. i’m running into a problem though… Subversion requires you to checkout whole directories. you can’t just checkout/edit one file. this isn’t a problem when you’re editing usr/src/cmd/ps/Makefile - but becomes annoying when you want to edit usr/src/Makefile.master.

why do i have to checkout everything in usr/src? that’s thousands of files i have to unnecessarily checkout when all i want to do is edit one file.

i know SCCS is old - but the more i use other SCMs, the more i like SCCS

Student Finds a Stolen Thesis by Thinking Like a Thief

Friday, Dec 23. 2005  –  Category: Computers, Musings

Student Finds a Stolen Thesis by Thinking Like a Thief

Pretty amazing story of a woman who managed to recover her USB drive after it had been stolen…. with her only copy of her thesis on it.

I gotta say though - she’s just plain stupid. What’s the first rule of computers? Back your stuff up!

I know when I was writing my thesis, I had a special alias called ‘thesis’ aliased to: gvim ~/Documents/Thesis/thesis.tex;scp ~/Documents/Thesis/thesis.tex [host1];scp ~/Documents/Thesis/thesis.tex [host2] … et. al until it was automatically backed up onto 4 different computers in 3 different time zones.

Solaris 10 Update 1 (s10u1) MD5 sums

Thursday, Dec 22. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris

Thought this might be of use to people downloading the ISOs… here are the md5sums from our internal repository. I believe they should match the ones up for public download, but the only one I’ve verified that with is the s10u1 SPARC DVD ISO.

here are md5sums for the DVD chunks. thanks to boyd from #opensolaris for the sparc md5 sums, and dwc- (also from #opensolaris) for the x86 md5 sums

Please let me know if these do or don’t match your downloaded versions…

are you bi?

Wednesday, Dec 21. 2005  –  Category: Musings

random funny moment i just remembered from saturday. jesse and i were waiting in the lift line at Kirkwood when we saw a girl that looked eerily like one of my previous girlfriends whose name was Mai… it’s hard to tell with goggles & helmet though.

i went up and asked if she was Mai, to which she replied “did you ask me if i was bi?”

uh… no.

build 29 done! (opensol-20051219)

Tuesday, Dec 20. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris

build 29 is up, in source and BFU form. SXCR ISOs probably won’t be up until the end of the week.

the putback logs are also up, and the source browser has been updated.

update: if you have installed the atheros and wificonfig drivers/tools from the laptop community already, please make sure you pkgrm those packages before updating via BFU

let it snow let it snow let it snow!

Sunday, Dec 18. 2005  –  Category: Musings

wow, and suddenly winter is here. the storm today has been nuts. with rain like this, it must be snowing like crazy up in the sierras.

in fact, it is.

i know this because we went up for a sweet sweet day of riding at Kirkwood yesterday. we had expected a mostly crappy day of boarding on icy snow with rocks poking through. instead, we were rewarded with some pretty decent snow. it was mostly hard pack, but had a light dusting of snow thanks to the snow that was falling all day.

that’s right. it snowed. all day. i believe the correct word, as the kids say these days is… “woot!“

the snow made for an interesting drive home. going up the hill towards the 8000 foot pass we saw car after car skidding, and sliding. most people left the same morning as us where there wasn’t snow until around 7000 or 7500 feet. on the drive home, there was snow down to 4500 feet. consequently, i think a fair number of people didn’t bring chains. we passed 5 different cars which had gotten involved in some nasty accidents. everywhere we looked going towards the pass, we saw cars spinning the wheels trying to get traction.

wanna know what the definition of safety and security is? it’s sitting inside your AWD car, with sure-footed traction as you solidly navigate nimbly through the cars spun out all over the road.

wanna know what the definition of sweet-sweet-comfort is? seeing your climate control sitting at a warm toasty 70 degrees while the outside thermostat registers 28 degrees as people try and get their cars corrected, and fumble trying to get their chains on their cars while they’re stranded on a hill.

i love my audi.

OpenSolaris @ TOSTA

Tuesday, Dec 13. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris

due to a mixup with the handouts, i didn’t have hardcopies of my slides at today’s presentation - so for those of you who find your way here to my blog by way of my business cards, i give to you my OpenSolaris presentation i presented today at the IT Symposium conference.

if you came to the presentation, i hope you enjoyed it! i had a great time talking with you all throughout the day!

a paradox of temperatures

Monday, Dec 12. 2005  –  Category: Musings

i’m both cold and warm at the same time.

cold because i arrived safe and sound in st. paul, and it’s 25 degrees out. susan says its 28. my watch said 21 in the parking lot. but regardless, it’s cold. cold enough for my sorry california ass anyway.

fortunately, the hotel i’m staying in has a fairly good Irish bar, and two pints of Harp later, and i was fairly well warmed up. enough to take down a pretty good order of fish & chips.

anyway. it’s cold.

thinking out loud

Monday, Dec 12. 2005  –  Category: Musings, OpenSolaris

i’m off to sunny st. paul, MN in a few hours for the TOSTA conference. looking forward to it…

got into work early this morning to crank out some code before i go. i’m working on an interesting problem, mirrouring ON externally via a read-only Subversion gateway.

internally, we use TeamWare/SCCS for SCM (source code management). the long-term plan is to adopt a new SCM solution that will enable us to move the gate outside of Sun so that everyone can have equal access to it. this requires a long, complicated evaluation process to whittle down the candidates that probably involves pagan rituals, games of Twister, and undoubtedly much drinking.

in the meantime, i’m trying to setup a read-only Subversion gateway that will at least enable people to checkout code without having to download an 80 megabyte tarball each time.

enter sccs2svn, a handy open-source script written by Robert Zeh to faciliate SCCS->SVN conversion. very cool. very time-saving. it borked on ON due to the sheer size of some of our changesets, but a quick hack to break up large changesets into multiple smaller ones seems to have fixed that.

the wrinkle to our specific problem is “squelch”-ing. this is my script which goes through the history of ON and removes any comments/code-deltas pre-2000/06/14, and any code-deltas in between 2000/06/14->2005/06/14 (but leaving comments for that time-frame). this keeps the lawyers happy.

so there are two problems i’m facing:

1. doing incremental squelching
2. incremental SCCS->SVN conversion

while a full squelch-ing run is not long (takes about 40-45 minutes for ON), it’s still tedious and a waste of time/resources. unfortunately, once a file has been squelched - it is no longer “bringover-able”, meaning you can’t update it simply within the realm of SCCS updates. so i’ve been working on a Perl script triggered by a procmail recipe which monitors the onnv-gate-notification mails, and will parse the list of files updated/renamed/removed/created by a putback, copy over the new files, and re-squelch them incrementally. but then there is the matter of serialising these actions. i.e., let’s say the order happens in:

1. person FOO puts back files A,B,C
2. person BAR puts back files D,E,F
3. person QWERTY does a putback removing file B

actions 1 & 2 can happen in parallel since they are independent of each other. but action 3 shouldn’t happen until action 1 occurs. but if all 3 happen quickly (within a minute of each other, let’s say), then procmail spins off 3 instances of Perl, one handling each event. while event 1 is happening, let’s say it’s processing/re-squelching file A, then event 3 also occurs removing file B from ON. event 1 then goes on to update and re-squelch file B, so file B is now back in ON.

bad. very bad. we need to serialise this shit.

so now i’ve got something mocked up which uses a client/server model & sockets. a Perl daemon stays running the whole time, and everytime procmail spawns the handler for the recipe, it calls a client which connects to the server and sends the request. the server can then evaluate whether the action can be allowed to happen in parallel, or if it must wait for a previous action to complete first.

does this seem reasonable? or is this overkill? i can’t decide. i’m sure something cool can be done using simpler file locking primitives… but i was in the mood to cook me up some sockets. plus there’s something nice about the alliteration of using ’sockets to solve the problem of serialising this shit’.

the incremental SCCS->SVN update step is the next one to tackle once i iron out the details of this serialisation problem. i haven’t thought much about it, but on the surface it seems easy right?