c0t0d0s0.org

It's not that frequent that you have bunch of engineers of Solaris in Germany for a day of presentations. However ... on December 3rd they are in Germany. I just want to invite you for this event. Please register for it on this website. It promises to be really interesting as the agenda contains the names of the who-is-who of engineering as well as interesting presentations. So if you want to listen to those people and ask them questions (or tell them what you think about their product )

Agenda
Time	Session	Speaker
09:00	Registration and Breakfast
09:45	Oracle Solaris - Strategy, Engineering Insights, Roadmap, and a Glimpse on Solaris in Oracle's IT	Markus Flierl
11:15	Coffee
11:35	Oracle Solaris 11.1: The Best Platform for Oracle - The Technologies Behind the Scenes	Bart Smaalders
12:35	Lunch
13:25	Solaris Security: Reduce Risk , Deliver Secure Services, and Monitor Compliance	Darren Moffat
14:10	Solaris 11 Provisioning and SMF - Insights from the Lead Engineers	Bart Smaalders & Liane Praza
14:55	Solaris Data Management - ZFS, NFS, dNFS, ASM, and OISP Integration with the Oracle DB	Darren Moffat
15:25	Coffee
15:45	Solaris 10 Patches and Solaris SRUs - News and Best Practices	Gerry Haskins
16:30	Cloud Formation: Implementing IaaS in Practice with Oracle Solaris	Joost Pronk
17:00	Q&A panel - All presenters and Solaris engineers

The mails with the slides for the attendees of the Oracle Breakfasts should be out by now, so i want to link people to the presentation i've held at the breakfast. I just whitened them (the c0t0d0s0//org is just a kind of an ineffective watermark ) as i don't think that my blog is the right location to publish oracle branded slides as it's by no means an official Oracle blog.


(click to view)

It is more a live demo put into slides and without the voice track it may be a little bit hard to understand, but maybe it is useful to some or the other.

Markus Flierl , VP in charge of Solaris Engineering at Oracle, wrote an interesting article about his impressions from the OOW2013 in "Impressions from Oracle Open World 2013". At first he gives an nice example what happens when engineers work together ... well ... to engineer things to work together:

When we initially tested the Oracle DB on this large machine it took 2800s to fill a 30TB SGA when running Oracle DB 11g on S11.1. Working closely with the Oracle DB team we have been able to get this down to about 130s now! That's a 21x speed-up! We had to do a whole bunch of work on both sides to accomplish that!

However he speaks a little about the future like Solaris Kernel Zones, the Unified Template Builder and the integration of OpenStack and Puppet as well. Really worth a read.

Okay, i know this will annihilate productivity for today, but just in case you have some brain cycles to spare: Here is a small jump and run game called Oracle Runner.

Interesting article about stuff you have to know when you have to use IDR (Interim Diagnostics / Relief) on your system: "Top Tip: Managing Solaris 11 IDRs".

Since Solaris 11.1 the ssh implementation of Solaris supports the usage of X.509 certificates. There is a tutorial of a colleague that explains the setup however when i linked to it a while ago, i got some mails telling me, that it was a little bit on the hard side to understand. So i thought it would be a nice idea to explain the stuff Hai-May Chao wrote in her article on OTN the LKSF way.

However there are a few differences: I won't explain that much about command lines and - more important - i'm using openssl instead of pktool to create keys and certificates.

That was really cool in the recent days. I made my 4 "Solaris Security 11" events as part of the Oracle Business breakfast series talks in the last 2 weeks. I don't have the final count, but the final numbers of attendees were north of 100 people, not bad for such small event series (it's organized by local technical colleagues) with extremely technical content. There is really a lot of interest in this kind of topics. I'm doing a final release at the preso at the moment for distribution. Think i will put a deoracleized version on the blog.

Friday was a little stressful. Did a second talk about "Oracle Virtual Networking" afterwards in front of a few colleagues. This is really great technology, so i like to talk about it. Closed at 14:10, went to the garage, arrived there at 14:13 (didn't know that there was parking space directly in front of the building), the machine for payment just took cash and only bills up to 20€. Dang. Just two 50€ bills. And 17 cents short of the money in coins. Damned. Okay, going into the adjacent shopping centre to get smaller bills. 14:21. Short traffic jam in the Peteul tunnel. Doesn't sound that bad alone, but my flight to HAM started boarding at 15:00 and so things started to get interesting and in the tunnel i got a little bit nervous. As i had to refuel and return a rental car it got even more interesting. To make the story short: Was at the gate at 15:10 .. not a single minute too early.

That said: Telling people about technology, sharing my knowledge and enthusiasm for it by doing such presentations. Could do this all the time

Ich möchte noch mal auf die beiden Vorträge zum Thema "Solaris 11 Security" hinweisen. In Hamburg und Berlin liefen sie ja schon, in Düsseldorf und München findet der Vortrag diese Woche statt: Am 18.9.2013 in Düsseldorf und am 20.9.2013 in München.

12 years and one day after NineEleven. It's okay only to remember the victims of Nineeleven on 9/11 of each year. But on all other days we should remember that civil rights is an ongoing fight, too. Not only against terrorist in the pre-nineeleven sense and terrorists in the inflationary post-nineeleven sense, but especially against people that offer you a little bit of security with the price tag of large dents in your civil rights.

Sometimes i would like to be able to do the jedi mind trick. Like "This isn't the performance issue you are searching for". Because it would be easier to convince people in that case that they saw the effect, but not the cause. That said, I think the real root cause on what i will describe in this block of this problem is the separation of database admins and system admins. But that's my personal opinion.. Imagine from one day to another, your storage goes mad. The analytic tools of your storage show long latencies, the led of the storage just show massive use of the storage. As you didn't made any change your first assumption is "storage has a defect" or "i just hit a bug in the storage firmware". At the end he or she thinks "No major release changes. Perhaps a few minor configuration changes. And none of them has to do with storage".

The new iPhone has a fingerprint scanner and some people are already complaining that this isn't good decision of Apple in this "NSA here, NSA there" times. Perhaps it's really not a clever idea from the PR perspective. However you have to do a threat analysis. What's more reasonable and more dangerous and damanging to you. The fear that the fingerprint (most often the sensor don't deliver a finger print but something like a hash code of the print) may leave the phone (you leave 1000 copies of your finger print a day around you just by grabbing stuff anyway). Or thieves, friends preparing a prank or your significant other just following the grease traces on your phone to find out the unlock code (which you don't need with a finger print scanner)?

Never underestimate the tendency of the audience and the time you spend with the discussion to discuss NSA stuff when you do a security presentation these days. I made my "Security with Solaris 11.1" preso in Hamburg without sildes and just demoing the security features live in front of the audience, however i think i need a slide version for it in oder to get back to speed when the discussion has diverted and you need to get to plan.