Sunday, May 30, 2010

OpenSolaris Crashed!

Updated:
Edited title from 'OpenSolaris Clashed' to 'OpenSolaris Crashed'. Thanks Lim for pointing out that mistake. :)

Last evening my OpenSolaris box fell inside a reboot loop, right after I chose the BE image to boot from, the machine rebooted itself, and this loop continued ad infinitum.

The first reaction I had was suspecting my system drive went dead. So I booted using a 2009.06 CD, trying to see if there is any disk rescue utility. Nope, there is none.

Trying to import the zpool that housed my data:

$pfexec zpool import -f dpool

It worked, so my data was fine. *phew*

But problem appeared when I tried to import the zpool with my root:

$pfexec zpool import -f rpool

*System rebooted*

I nearly made the conclusion the drive was dead, but to further nail it down to hardware problem, I went ahead and installed a new copy of OS.

Everything went smoothly!! The system boots up properly again and again. Hey, I had a software issue.

Now I kind of suspect why 2010.04 never came out. The kernel has a very latent bug that will silently corrupt the system to total boot failure.

I guess I will use snv_111b for now, or until I can install FreeBSD...

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Office Life

Office life is turning a bit hectic ever since I started the new project. Now I am managing a guy while writing code myself. Management is always no fun.

Today my colleague was giving quite a bit of harsh words to one of his subordinates. My colleague's tone was irritated and I overheard fragments of raised voices "You can't tell this to the customers! We must find a work-around."

It seems his man was giving him some headaches by telling him the problems, instead of the solutions. Today a headhunter emailed me about an opportunity for a European company. I replied and now waiting to see how it goes.


Tuesday, May 18, 2010

On Security

I am reading an article on security hashing, and when the authors mentioned the reason why one type of hashing is better than the other, here is what they said:


Bcrypt was invented by two smart guys and PHK’s was only invented by one smart guy. That's literally twice the smart

Think about it. Twice the smart, how elegant, how measurable, and how exact. Even though there is a word 'literally', but I still think this reason is really funny.

If this argument ever makes sense, then we must say Google products have a lot of smart. :)

Sunday, May 09, 2010

On FreeBSD

I mentioned I would take a look on FreeBSD, indeed I did. However my journey was not a smooth one. In fact, the installation process was hung in the middle at the screen prompting for language. I tried both the amd64 and generic i386 images, all to no avail. I guess I will wait for awhile for the next FreeBSD...

Saturday, May 01, 2010

Promise

I watched Corpse Bride again. Like Victor in the movie, I also made a promise, and I am still keeping it. So please tell me, is this a good idea...?

OpenSolaris Starts To Suck

OpenSolaris 2010.4 is supposed to come out as now already 2010.5, but this doesn't happen. Both OpenSolaris.org and Oracle have been mum on this issue. Given OpenSolaris is not in active development, and FreeBSD does support ZFS, I am thinking to convert to FreeBSD once for all.

The new FreeBSD 8.0 seems very promising, and I will download it for a spin in the very near future.