Our security officer

On google, human rights and business opportunities

Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited.

Bill Gates

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.

MS Word: changing individual bullets

Managing lists has always been a pain in MS Word.
My most recent issue: whenever you change an item in a list in MS Word 2007, the whole list tends to change along and you see the dreaded lightning icon, indication MS Word did more than you asked:

Sometimes you don't want that, e.g.  i could use different bullets within a list level to convey a special meaning:

This tip gave me a solution: If you only want to change one item in the list, select the end of paragraph mark of the item (supposing you have enabled displaying these) and then change the bullet. Your modification will be limited to this one bullet.

Search engine client virus

A recent bunch of virusses (gumblar and bahama botnet (youtube demo)) redirect your search results to advertising sites before going to the desired target.
You never get to see the intermediate sites, but they gain money through advertisement hits.

Solaris zones components

Commands

• zoneadm: manage a zone
• zonecfg: configure a zone
• zlogin: login to a zone
  
  
  • -C: console
• ps –z <zone>: list only <zone> processes from global zone

Zone state transitions and associated commands 

• Alternate commands can exist
• A Solaris OS in a zone is only initialised (sysidtool) upon first console login.
• The shutdown commands are executed from within the zone.

Daemons

• zoneadmd: zone manager
• zsched:  scheduler in the zone

Files

• /etc/zones/index: index configured zones (and their state)
• /etc/zones/<zone>.xml: per zone configuration file (from zonecfg)

Links

FAQ
BrandZ FAQ
Zones limitations\
Sun Management Center GUI

Add an external USB disk to solaris (x86)

These are the steps I took to add an external USB disk to my x86 Solaris station, partition it and put ufs filesystems on it.

• Tell the removable volume manager to leave USB disks alone
  
  
  • edit /etc/vold.conf
    
    

    # commented the following line
    # use rmdisk drive /dev/rdsk/c*s2 dev_rmdisk.so rmdisk%d
    

    
    
  • Activate the configuration change
    
    

    # svcadm refresh volfs
    

    
    
  
  
• attach the USB drive
• lookup the USB device name
  
  

  # rmformat
  Looking for devices...
       1. Volmgt Node: /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0
          Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2
          Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@6/ide@0/sd@0,0
          Connected Device: LITE-ON  DVD SOHD-16P9S   F3S2
          Device Type: DVD Reader
       2. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0
          Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci108e,5347@2,1/storage@4/disk@0,0
          Connected Device: ST316021 2A               0000
          Device Type: Removable
  

  
  
• Solaris x86: create a Solaris fdisk partition on the device
  
  

  # fdisk -B /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0
  

  
  
• Partition the drive. The format expert option is needed for the drive to show up:
  
  

  # format -e
  Searching for disks...done
  
  AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
         0. c1t0d0 <DEFAULT cyl 9726 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
            /pci@0,0/pci108e,5347@7/disk@0,0
        1 . c2t0d0 <DEFAULT cyl 19454 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
            /pci@0,0/pci108e,5347@2,1/storage@4/disk@0,0
  Specify disk (enter its number): 1
  ...
  

  
  
• Now partition the drive.
  
  
  • Solaris x86: keep clear of cylinder0. It is in slice 8 and reserved for the VTOC and booting (grub).
  
  
• create a file system on your partition(s) (I ignored the warning)
  
  

  # newfs /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0
  Warning: setting rpm to 60
  newfs: construct a new file system /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0: (y/n)? y
  ...
  

  
  
• Add the file system to /etc/vfstab
  
  

  ...
  /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0       /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0      / stuff      ufs     1       yes
  

  
  
• mount the file system

# mount /stuff