Oracle to buy Sun

This blog is typically about stuff I'm doing, but having invested 10 years in working with Sun kit, I think this deserves a comment. I'm not particularly qualified to make an informed contribution to the Oracle buyout discussion, but since that doesn't stop most Slashdot commentators, here are my observations:

1) It could have been a lot worse. If IBM had bought Oracle, they would have two directly competing CPU architectures (POWER and SPARC), two directly competing Unix implementations (AIX and Solaris), directly competing storage, Java development tools, application servers, databases etc. The long term outcome would have been that some of these technologies would have been sunset and development consolidated.

2) It could have been much, much worse: HP could have bought Sun. See DEC/Digital and the Compaq merger to see how that would have played out.

3) Sun seems to get a bad rap from the Slashdot crowd, but the number of people who are dismayed that their favourite Sun product is under threat highlights the significance that Sun has in the market. This is especially telling when you see that the object of dismay is one of many different products: Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, Virtualbox, MySQL...

4) Oracle have now migrated from being a software solutions house to a total solutions provider. Although there is talk that Oracle will sell off SPARC to Fujitsu, or port everything to x86, the reality is that SPARC is a very lucrative platform for Sun and will be a revenue generator for Oracle. In fact, Oracle now own a very good portfolio.

5) In the last 12-18 months, Sun has "got" Open Source. I'm not sure Oracle has. Hopefully the Sun culture will impact Oracle (remember how NeXT "absorbed" Apple after being bought?).

So although I'm no expert in the area of business, the future for Sun might be okay after all. Time will tell...

Getting CIFS permissions working in OpenSolaris

I blogged a while back about how I managed to get NFS4 configured on my OpenSolaris server. At the end of that blog, I promised to update on getting CIFS working as well using the OpenSolaris CIFS server.

Finally got around to it tonight. Took a while as every attempt from my Vista machine was reporting an "Access Denied" message when running "net view \\opensolaris".

To cut a long story short, the problem was caused by me setting up a mapping between Unix and Windows using the idmap command. The answer was to remove any mappings and allow the CIFS server to work it out itself. All sorted!

Upgrading to OpenSUSE 11.1

Although it's been out for a number of months (released in December), I've just taken the step of upgrading my workstation to OpenSUSE 11.1. In order to perform a clean upgrade, I decided a reinstall from scratch would be easiest, especially since my services and custom scripts are now running on the OpenSolaris server.

I finally took this opportunity to move all my documents to the server. They now benefit from having regular ZFS snapshots and get backed up to the external USB drive for added security.

Once my home area was clean and having backed up my ~/.mozilla directory, I proceeded to install from the OpenSUSE 11.1 DVD download. I had previously used the 64bit version and hit a few problems with Java and Flash, so this time I opted for a 32bit install (only got 2GB RAM so not a huge hit). All worked as expected, although the default partitioning seems a bit tight - something I've had to rectify this morning using LVM. If installing, it would be worth creating a bigger root filesystem (15GB?) (assuming you're not using multiple partitions for /usr, /var etc.)

The only thing that is bugging me slightly is the beagled indexing daemon causes the CPU fans to spin up when the machine is idle. I need to see if this is because it's doing an initial index build or if this will be permanent, in which case I might turn beagle off.

I was surprised at how easily the Compiz "wobbly windows" was to enable, especially when I remember how difficult and flakey it used to be. I have however turned it off because it's faster without the effects.

All in all, a good distribution upgrade with no major issues.

Copying symbolic links

Sometimes it's useful to copy a directory that contains symlinks. The default cp behaviour is to follow the symlink and copy the file the symlink points to. If you want to preserve the symlinks as symlinks, then the flags the cp command uses depends on the operating system:

Solaris 10 and Linux:

$ cp -rP dir1/* dir2

The -r is recursive (in case dir1 has subdirectories) and the -P preserves the symlink.

AIX 5.2:

$ cp -rh dir1/* dir2

The -r is the same as Solaris, the -h preserves the symlink.

Does XenServer have a future?

Citrix has made their hypervisor based virtualisation product, XenServer, available for free. There has been a free "Express" version out for a while, but this was limited in the number of VMs it could support and came with a limited subset of functionality (similar to ESXi).

The new release makes most of the Advanced functionality available for free, including multi-server management and live migration between hosts. This competes with VMware very well, to the point that a virtualised Citrix (XenApp) solution I am working on will most probably run on the free XenServer and not on the pay-for ESX.

So why do I wonder whether XenServer has a future?

Citrix are looking to get customers hooked on XenServer with the aim of upselling a management suite called "Citrix Essentials for XenServer". The thing that concerns me is they also have a product called "Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V".

On the one hand this makes sense. By providing the same management tools for both XenServer and Hyper-V, Citrix are trying to make the underlying hypervisor a commodity item. The real advantage is in the management layer.

But development of XenServer is not free, and Citrix get no money directly from it. So why bother continuing development in the long term, when they can "superset" on top of Hyper-V, a hypervisor that Citrix don't have to spend any development funds on.

I hope I'm wrong, because XenServer looks interesting, but it wouldn't surprise me to see a future announcement where Citrix drop XenServer and adopt Hyper-V as their favoured hypervisor.

WSUS under Server 2008

I configured a WSUS server under Server 2008 and created a GPO to instruct all the other Windows VMs in my test environment to point to it. Although the GPO was being pushed out, the WSUS console did not detect any computers.

After speaking to some colleagues about this (thanks Rob!), I tried manually running a Windows Update from one of the clients. This produced the following error: 80072EE6

Googling this suggested the problem was an "unknown protocol" and one post suggested checking that the GPO settings for the intranet server included the "http://" prefix before the hostname. I checked and found I didn't have that setting. Adding it in and then forcing a gpupdate worked and the clients have started to appear.

Joining an OpenSolaris CIFS server to an AD domain

These notes are rough, but might prove useful in the future (or to someone else who had the same problem). I wanted to join my newly created OpenSolaris 2008.11 installation to my experimental Windows Server 2008 Active Directory. I followed the tutorial in the Solaris CIFS Administration Guide, but when I attempted the actual join command, it failed with LOGIN_FAILURE.

Here's the answer:

Firstly, make sure you have the IP address setup correctly, name added in /etc/hosts, DNS setup correctly in /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf. You make sure you are on the same domain as the Active Directory ("windows.zone" in my case).

Secondly, make sure your system clock is synchronized with the domain controller:

# ntpdate dc01.windows.zone

Then setup Kerberos by editing /etc/krb5/krb5.conf. This is documented in the manual.

Install the SMB Server using the package manager and start it up using:

# svcadm enable -r smb/server

Then try to join the domain:

# smbadm join -u administrator windows.zone

For me, this is where it failed. The mailing lists suggest that the problem might be related to smb signing. On the DC, I opened up the Group Policy Management tool and changed the following:

Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Net
Logon\Allow Cryptography Algorithms Compatible with Windows NT 4.0 -> Enabled

I then ran a gpupdate /force.

Finally, I read that the sharectl command on the OpenSolaris server should be run to use NTLMv2 authentication:

# sharectl set -p lmauth_level=2 smb

I re-ran the join command, and it worked properly. OpenSolaris CIFS server now part of the Active Directory domain.