What did you do on 9/11?

I was teaching a Solaris security course that day, with some NATO people in the class.
I remember meeting my colleague Guido in the corridor saying "World War III just started".
I told the class the news and went on with the course.
Next morning, Raoul, manager of Sun Education Belgium, had a minute of silence for everybody.
One of the British officers told another NATO attendee he should not be wearing a US Army T-shirt, because he was exposing himself as a target.

Sun Grid Engine @ Oracle

Sun Grid Engine used to be available as an Open Source product.
With the purchase of Sun by Oracle, the product will be called Oracle Grid Engine.
Future Oracle Grid Engine versions will no longer be open source.The current version of Oracle Grid Engine is 6.2 update 7.
The Open Source version at the time of the transition (6.2 update 5) was moved to SourceForge and re-branded to Open Grid Scheduler. There is limited activity and progress on the open source project.
Univa provides commercial support for the open source product at $100 yearly per core. Univa also sells a product with closed source extensions as Univa Grid Engine version 8.

Oracle recently reversed its policy of commercialising Sun open source projects for some products that successfully forked:

• Oracle stopped the commercial version of OpenOffice (but AFAIK the ODF 1.2 plugin for MS Office is still not free)
• Oracle proposed to moved control of Hudson to the Eclipse foundation, after the fork of Jenkins

I doubt that a similar move will happen for Grid Engine

LibreOffice: OOo without Oracle

The OpenOffice public domain community has separated itself from its Oracle head. The body will walk on as The Document Foundation.
Back in the previous millenium Sun Microystems bought a German office suit, called StarOffice, running on Unix as well as Windows.
Sun rebranded the product to OpenOffice and made it a free, public domain competitor for MS Office.
OpenOffice came under the stewardship of Oracle, when it acquired Sun.
Oracle's decision to charge for a previously free MSOffice plugin, that allows it to read the Open Document Format (ODF), created a lot of irritation in the public domain community.
Meanwhile Oracle is continuing work on, Oracle Cloud Office, based on JavaFX technology. Remark that it  does not have the Open word in its name.
Recently Oracle closed up Sun's OpenSolaris OS. In response a community project, OpenIndiana, was created.
In a preemtive strike, the community (FSF, Oasis, Google, Novell, Red Hat, Gnome...)  now has declared it's independance of Oracle. Because Oracle holds the trademark, the suite has been rebranded to LibreOffice.

SAP buys Sybase

In my previous company our two main products were Sun and Sybase.
Both have now been sold within a short interval:
Sybase to SAP
Sun to Oracle

Oracle free software reality check

Policy shifts, almost 3 months after Oracle acquired Sun:

• Oracle has blocked access to Solaris security patches for people without a support contract.
• Oracle has stopped shipping free OpenSolaris CD’s.
• Oracle is discontinuing the open and free Sun Identity Manager.
• Oracle has made the MS Office ODF 1.2 plugin paying (with a minimum of $9000 for 100 users).

Register a Solaris system for patch updates

You can bring a Solaris automatically up to date with the latest recommended or security (if you do not have a support contract) patches.

You can do this using

• a graphical tool: /usr/bin/updatemanager
• a command line tool: /usr/sbin/smpatch

updatemanager will guide you through a series of screens to register yourself and your system. Even if you use the graphical tool to register, you can use the command line interface later on to keep your system up to date.

Here’s the procedure to register without using the graphical updatemanager tool.

1. Register for a Sun Online account on the web. This is a common account for accessing SunSolve, Sun developer connection…
2. Prepare a registration file and fill in your user name, password, system and optionally other information like contract number and proxy. You can use /usr/lib/breg/data/RegistrationProfile.properties  as a template.
3. Register your system

 # sconadm –a –r <yourRegistrationFile>

Here’s a Sunsolve howto on this topic.

Gosling Goes

James Gosling father of euh... NeWS (Network Windowing System) leaves Sun Oracle.
A great many people will be yelling the end is nigh.
Not me.

Sunset

After what seemed like ages, the EC has given the green light to the take over of Sun by Oracle.
I have been working on Sun almost from the start of my working life, so this is a bit of a sad moment.
The delay was caused by opposition by former MySQL owners, and hurt Sun badly.
These guys first cashed in when they sold their product and now wanted to have their word to say on what happens with it. I entirely agree with old JBoss badmouth Marc Fleury on this.

Solaris version numbering

SunOS	Solaris	Flavour
SunOS 4	Solaris 1 (retroactive name)	BSD (Berkeley)
SunOS 5.0	Solaris 2.0	SVR4 (System five)
SunOS 5.1	Solaris 2.1	SVR4 (System five)
…	…	…
SunOS 5.6	Solaris 2.6
SunOS 5.7	Solaris 7
SunOS 5.8	Solaris 8
…	…

To get the SunOS release number:

$ uname –r
5.10
To get the update within a release:

$ cat /etc/release
Solaris 10 5/09 s10s_u7wos_08 SPARC
…
This is Solaris 10 update 7, released 5/2009
Solaris user commands are typically in /usr/bin.
You find other flavours  of these commands (if different) in

• /usr/ucb (Berkeley)
• /usr/xpg4/bin (X/Open Portability Guide v4 compliant)

Netbeans 6.5 is out

Highlights:

• PHP support
• better javascript/AJAXsupport
• better SQL support
• Groovy support
• automatic compile on save
• CamelCase code completion!
• Support for Windows UNC paths (shared network folders)!
• slow startup!

The UML module is still unbundled (and rightly so)

Solaris patching

Patch Check Advanced (pca) generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads patches. It resolves dependencies between patches and installs them in correct order. It can be the only tool you ever need for patch management, be it on a single machine or a complete network.

Sun has offered various tools in the past for patch analysis and management, e.g. PatchDiag, PatchCheck, PatchPro, smpatch, Sun Update Connection (see the Sun Patch Portal for details). Some of them are not actively maintained, some are huge and opaque, some don't run on older Solaris releases or stripped-down machines, some require complicated installation and registration procedures.

This is the intro for Martin Paul's excellent pca tool. Well said, and he's even ommiting the changes in underlying Sun tools and sites: updatemanager, anonymous FTP, wget, showrev, patchadd, installpatch, install_cluster, sunsolve, Sun xVM Ops Center (try pronouncing that), sunconnection.sun.com, updates.sun.com, updateserver.sun.com...

OpenOffice 3 is out

Finally the free opensource office suite is out with support for the docx format,
Microsoft's secret weapon for luring users to Office 2007.