Lenz Grimmer's blog

I tend to switch between Linux and OpenSolaris as my desktop operating system from time to time. To be more flexible in this setup, I store most of my work-related data (e.g. source trees, VirtualBox images) on an external 320GB USB disk drive, using the ZFS file system. While OpenSolaris supports ZFS natively, I can access the file system on Linux using zfs-fuse and I could even mount these file systems on a FreeBSD system, if needed. There aren't that many file systems that allow an easy exchange of data between (Open)Solaris and Linux – the other ones that I am aware of are FAT and UFS, which both don't give me the confidence and flexibility I need.

A while ago, I purchased a second external drive of the same size and now use both of them in a mirrored configuration. This gives me several benefits:

• Redundancy: external disk drives have a higher risk of getting physically damaged, so having a mirrored copy of my data ensures that I won't lose anything important if one of the drives dies.
• Increased performance: ZFS is capable of distributing reads across both devices, thus I get twice the speed of a single USB 2.0 port, if I connect the drives to ports attached to separate USB host controllers.
• Automatic resyncing: When I'm on the road, I only take one half of the mirror with me. In case this drive gets lost/stolen, I still have a second copy of the data at home. ZFS complains about the pool being in degraded state, but continues to work normally. When I return home, I simply attach the second drive again and ZFS automatically resyncs (resilvers) anything that has been modified in the meanwhile.
• I can use snapshots for backup purposes. I have a small Intel Atom based PC (running OpenSolaris) that acts as my central file server (using two 1TB disks in a ZFS mirror) and CUPS print server. If I want to create a backup of my external USB disks, I create ZFS snapshots of the file systems in question and transfer these to the home server using "zfs send/receive". This works both locally by connecting the drives to the server box directly or via SSH over the network. I wrote a small shell script to automate this process. The transfer is done in an incremental fashion – only the differences between the current and the last snapshot are being propagated. To save disk space on the external drives, I usually discard all older snapshots except for the last one or two. On the file server, I maintain snapshots for a longer time period. The snapshots are named by using a simple date/time timestamp (filesystem@YYYY-MM-DD-HH:MM), this makes it easy to go back to a particular snapshot in case I'm looking for something I may have removed by accident, but I still recall when it was last used.

From my experience, ZFS is a very solid and reliable solution, providing impressive functionality with a very user-friendly UI (you only need use two commands, zfs and zpool).

If you want to learn more about ZFS and how to use it in practice, consider attending my upcoming talk (in German) about this subject at FrOSCon 2010 in Sankt Augustin, Germany!

I recently received a question from Robin Schumacher at Calpont, the makers of the InfiniDB analytics database engine for MySQL: "How would you recommend we try and get bundled in with the various Linux distros?"

Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.

First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation media (e.g. CD-ROMs or a DVD). Therefore they take a very close look at each package and if it's really needed to be part of the installation medium or if it's fine to provide it for download from a package repository instead.

Distributors prefer to keep their core product small and restricted to the "basic OS building blocks". While MySQL might still be considered to be a part of this, this probably does not apply to the various plugins and extensions that are available for it. Therefore the best approach is to invest some engineering time and start doing the packaging yourself, either by hiring an engineer capable of creating and maintaining the packages, or by finding someone in your community who has the required experiences and is willing to do it.

While it's of course possible to set up and maintain your own build and package hosting infrastructure for that, I recommend to make use of the existing services provided by the distributors.

The top tier distributors all provide means of offloading the maintenance of "non-core" packages to their community, offering various options for packages to be made available. For example, Novell/openSUSE provide the free "Build Service", which is capable of building packages for other distributions as well (e.g. Fedora, Mandriva, Debian/Ubuntu, etc.). In addition to automating the builds, the Build Service also takes care of the distribution via their download mirror network and ensures that your application can be found via their package search interface.

Red Hat/Fedora provide something similar, named "Koji" – but it's "Fedora only". Here's a HOWTO that outlines the process of becoming a Fedora package maintainer.

Ubuntu/Canonical have "Personal Package Archives (PPAs) – if your project is hosted on Launchpad already, that might be something to look into for providing Debian/Ubuntu packages. Alternatively you could join the Debian project and start building and maintaining your package there. They maintain a list of "Work-Needing and Prospective Packages", a description of the process on how to become a new maintainer is outlined here.

If you'd like to target Solaris/OpenSolaris as well, there is the OpenSolaris Source Juicer – a web service which allows OpenSolaris community developers to build packages (using RPM spec files) and publish them for review, so they will be included in an official package repository. The Software Porters Community Group coordinates, advocates, encourages and helps with the porting of Software from multiple Platforms to the OpenSolaris Platform.

With IntelliJ now being available under an Open Source license, developers have another option to choose from when it comes to Java-based IDEs/Frameworks (Eclipse and NetBeans being the other two prominent ones). Choice is always good, and being an Open Source enthusiast, I of course welcome JetBrain's move!

However, as I'm not really a heavy GUI-based IDE user myself, I can't really comment on which one is the best. These kind of discussions tend to turn into a Holy War anyway... In the end it's likely that each of them gets the job done and you have to come to your own conclusions, based on your personal preference and requirements.

I personally would be interested in seeing how their support for PHP or Python compares to the one in NetBeans. Their plugin repository lists more that 560 plugins, including many for database connectivity/modeling/navigation (incl. support for MySQL). I'm also glad to see that they have a plugin for Bazaar, something that I'm desperately missing from NetBeans!

Interestingly, they decided to keep a few parts proprietary, it's going to be interesting to see how this will turn out for them and if developers will be willing to pay for these extra features, considering that most of this is available for free from the other two projects.

Their Contributor License Agreement looks like it has been derived from the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is always nice to see. I assume this can be attributed to Roman Strobl - I was positively surprised to notice that he joined their team as a technology evangelist in June! Roman did a great job in spreading the NetBeans and OpenSolaris gospel at Sun before and I briefly met him at this year's FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Congratulations!

It's almost two weeks now since FrOSCon and the OpenSQL Camp subconference have taken place in Sankt Augustin, Germany — about time for a summary and update from my side!

First off, I would like to thank all of the participants and supporters, particularly my colleagues Regina Steyer and Iris Musiol for the perfect logistics and co-sponsoring as well as Uli Graef, Thorsten Frueauf, Matthias Schmidt, Alexander Rubin and Joerg Moellenkamp for manning the Sun booth and the help on site.

Another big Thank You goes out to my team mates Giuseppe and Colin as well as to Sheeri K. Cabral, who were a big help in keeping the OpenSQL Camp on track and by supporting the event by giving talks. In addition to that, Sheeri recorded most of the OpenSQL Camp sessions on video and published them in record time!

So here's a quick summary of both events from my side, starting with the main conference.

Sun was a Gold sponsor of the event and we had a booth right at the main entrance area; it could hardly be missed. It consisted of two large and two small desks as well as a divider behind them. For demos, we had a (slightly noisy) Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server and four SunRay 2 Thin Clients (which by themselves triggered a lot of questions and curiosity by many visitors). The booth was flanked by rollup-banners on both sides as well as various posters attached to the divider. Here's a picture of our booth before the event opened:



We demoed Open Solaris, Open HA Cluster, NetBeans/Java and MySQL. We also had a lot of brochures about various products, OpenSolaris 2009.06 Live-CDs incl. booklets as well as some MySQL-T-Shirts to hand out. We distributed over 300 CDs and received a lot of positive feedback about the distribution.

We also had a number of talks in the main conference track (both German and English):

• Lenz Grimmer: Working for a Virtual Company - How we do it at MySQL (OGG Video)
• Giuseppe Maxia: MySQL Sandbox 3 - Making your life with databases easier than ever (OGG Video)
• Ulrich Graef: ZFS - Neue Funktionen und Technologien
• Thorsten Früauf: Hochverfügbarkeit mit minimalem Cluster - Open HA Cluster on OpenSolaris (OGG Video)
• Jörg Möllenkamp: Insights to Opensolaris (OGG Video)

The comments and ratings of these sessions were generally very positive. Our booth was well attended, especially during the session breaks. In total, there were over 1.400 visitors at the conference over the two days.

I personally did not attend many sessions in the main conference tracks, as I was too occupied with the OpenSQL Camp and the booth organization. However, I managed to listen to Uli Graef's talk, which was a very technical and interesting session about ZFS features and internals. Being a big fan of ZFS myself, this was a very worthwhile session to be at and my impression was that it encouraged others to take a closer look at this truly amazing file system.

The second talk I attended was Sunday's keynote by Dries Buytaert from the Drupal project about "The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source
Communities". Dries is a great speaker with visually stunning slides. He is funny, too — if you have a moment, you should watch the video recording of his keynote. An uncut "pre-release" version of his talk is already available as an OGG Video file.

As for previous FrOSCons (is that the proper plural?), there was a social event scheduled for Saturday evening, providing barbecue (Steaks and Sausages as well as vegetarian dishes) and drinks. This event usually takes place outside and is always an excellent opportunity for networking and talking with key people from other OSS communities and projects. And there was plenty of time for talking - the queues for the grilled food were long...

Here is a list of other blogs and articles about FrOSCon that are worth a read (in no particular order and both German and English):

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5878-FrOSCon-2009-first-day.html
• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5879-FrOSCon-09-Nachlese.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/TF/entry/hochverf%C3%BCgbarkeit_mit_minimalem_cluster
• http://robilad.livejournal.com/53194.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/froscon_the_free_and_open
• http://www.linux-magazin.de/content/view/full/43032
• http://community.oreilly.de/blog/2009/08/25/das-war-die-froscon-2009/
• http://www.naturalnik.de/wordpress/2009/08/froscon-2009/
• http://www.alexander-stelter.de/blog/archives/361-FrOSCon-2009-Review-+-Bilder.html

OpenSQL Camp, European Edition

In addition to the main conference tracks, FrOSCon also provided a number of so-called "Developer Rooms" to OSS projects, so that they could organize sub-conferences or hackfests of their own. We applied for a room to set up a conference dubbed "OpenSQL Camp", related to the topic of Open Source databases, which was approved.

We then sent out a call for papers and invited people from the many OSS database communities to join us and talk about their projects. Every session proposal was published on the OpenSQL Camp web site and people were able to vote on the sessions they were most interested in via email or twitter:

• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Proposed_Sessions
• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Reviewing_and_Voting

The organization and scheduling of the talks and speakers was done via the FrOSCon conference system (Pentabarf), which made it very easy to perform this task and also made sure that the OpenSQL Camp sessions were included in the main conference program. Below is a full list of sessions at our subconference (see the FrOSCon Program page for abstracts, speaker info, links and slides). We had two cancellations by speakers on short notice, but were able to cover the gaps with ad-hoc presentations. I'd like to send a special thanks to Geert Vanderkelen, who gave a great presentation about MySQL Cluster despite the very short notice and some technical difficulties at the beginning!

• Sheeri K. Cabral: A Better mysqltuner (Video)
• Linas Virbalas: Bringing Master/Slave into the 21st Century using Tungsten Database Clustering (Video)
• Holger Klemt: Firebird - a really free database used in free and commercial projects (Video)
• Seppo Jaakola: Galera Replication (Video)
• Kristian Waagan: Getting acquainted with Apache Derby (Video)
• Stephane Combaudon: Minimizing data access with covering indexes
• Lenz Grimmer: MySQL High Availability Solutions (Video)
• Jan Kneschke: MySQL Proxy: a MySQL toolbox (Video)
• Felix Schupp: New kid on the block: The BlackRay Data Engine (Video)
• Vladimir Kolesnikov: PBXT: Technology trends that affect your database (Video)
• Panel Discussion: The OSS Toolshed Shootout (Video)
• Darren Cassar: Securich - MySQL user administration and security made easy!
• Giuseppe Maxia: Sharding for the masses (Video)
• Geert Vanderkelen: An introduction to MySQL Cluster

Most talks attracted between 20-50 attendees and we had a great mix of topics from several different database projects (with a slight majority of MySQL-related talks). The Panel Discussion (moderated by me), called the "OSS Toolshed Shootout" went quite well and the speakers had a good time answering questions on various topics about their projects. Thanks again to all OpenSQL Camp speakers for making this event a success!

All in all I think that both FrOSCon and OpenSQL Camp were well worth supporting and attending - we were able to provide insight and trigger some interesting discussions among the OSS enthusiasts and developers in the audience. It was also a good opportunity in get in touch with many people of other OSS communities, fostering the MySQL (and other Sun OSS projects) ecosystem.

Here is a Flickr slide show of my own pictures - more photos can be found in the FrOSCon Gallery and the links page on the Wiki.

I personally look forward to next year's FrOSCon - a Big Thanks to the organizers for another great event!

There have been several similar articles to this one, but I find it pretty amazing to see all these emerging and established Solaris/OpenSolaris distributions. It's a good sign of a healthy community!

So here is my collection - please let me know if I forgot one.

Maintained by Sun Microsystems:

• Solaris 10: The commercial, production-ready and full supported version, similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
• OpenSolaris: This is the "official" OpenSolaris distribution, developed & supported by Sun. Can be compared to Fedora or openSUSE Linux - this is the version which will become the basis of future "Enterprise" releases with a different support and maintenance model. The developers aim on publishing a release roughly every six months.
• Solaris Express: Community Edition (SX:CE): is Sun's periodically built unsupported distribution of OpenSolaris (along with many additional open-source and a few closed-source components necessary to make a complete installable system). However, it looks as if Sun plans to discontinue the production of this version soon.
• Solaris Express: Sun's official distribution of OpenSolaris. These are provided primarily for customers interested in trying out new features of the Solaris release currently under development without the total cutting-edge-ness of the Solaris Express: Community Edition

Third-party distributions (in alphabetical order):

• AuroraUX: A core operating system for high integrity scientific computing. AuroraUX is a Solaris-derived kernel- and user- land. The core of the project are its utilities written in Ada. When necessary, poorly implemented features get fixed or rewritten, as well.
• Belenix: BeleniX is an OpenSolaris Distribution with a Live CD (runs directly off the CD). It can be installed to harddisk and is free to use, modify and distribute.
• Embedded Operating system/Networking (EON): A RAM-based live ZFS NAS appliance (CIFS/NFS/Samba) that boots from USB.
• Jaris: An OpenSolaris derivative suitable for Japanese users, providing a windows-like environment. (The web site is available in Japanese only)
• Korona: A live DVD distribution based on OpenSolaris, but using KDE 4.3 as the default desktop.
• Martux: A barebones OpenSolaris distribution for SPARC
• MilaX: MilaX is a small size Live CD distribution which runs completely off a miniCD, bootable business card or USB flash drive.
• Nexenta Core: Basically an OpenSolaris Kernel with an Ubuntu/GNU userland (including an improved version of apt-get that utilizes ZFS snapshots to perform rollbacks of failed upgrades)
• SchilliX: The very first independent OpenSolaris-based distribution (seems like it's not maintained anymore)
• StormOS: an OpenSolaris desktop distribution, based on Nexenta Core

My last post about Basic MySQL Security generated a number of interesting comments, thanks for all your feedback! I'd like to address a few points that were mentioned there:

While the problem seems to be a non-issue on Linux, Keith Murphy stated that the password might still be visible on other Unix operating systems (e.g. Solaris), as described in Bug#11952 in our bug database. According to the bug report, it depends on the implementation of "ps" — there seems to be a BSD variant (/usr/ucb/ps) as well as a SysV implementation (/usr/bin/ps).

However, on my tests on OpenSolaris (2008.11), both still displayed the password! So be aware of this when working on non-Linux systems and better double check the behaviour on your particular platform. The bug report provides a few more details about this issue, apparently it cannot be fixed for all platforms.

I also pointed out that the password will end up in your shell history and Jay Pipes emphasized this in his comment. As I wrote, you need to make sure that your shell history file is properly protected against access by other users! Usually, a chmod 600 ~/.bash_history will fix this. Most shells create these files with appropriate permissions automatically or can be configured to do so (check your shell's manual page with man `basename $SHELL`).

But there are more potential password leaks that I would like to mention, while we're on the topic: the mysql command line client maintains a history file of its own, that you should be aware of. The history is convenient for easily going back in your list of previous SQL statements by using the Up/Down cursor keys or searching for a particular query by using the CTRL+R shortcut. However, the MySQL client stores all your SQL statements in a file ~/.mysql_history in your home directory by default, similar to how your unix shell does it. So if you are adding new MySQL user accounts using the GRANT ... IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD... statement, the user's password will be written to the history file in plain text, visible to everyone who has the appropriate file system privileges. Keep that in mind when performing administrative tasks on a MySQL server and make sure to restrict access to that file! By default, the client creates the file with only read and write permissions for the user (600), but if you want to be on the safe side you can of course remove it after you entered passwords on the MySQL command line. As an alternative, you can start the MySQL command line client by using the "-q / --quick" option, which skips using the history file for this particular session. If you can live without a command line history in general, you could simply replace that history file with a symbolic link to /dev/null:

$ ln -fs /dev/null ~/.mysql_history

Another attack vector for local users to obtain MySQL passwords are the MySQL server log files — anyone with file system access to the binary log files can extract possible GRANT statements from there using the mysqlbinlog command! So you need to make sure that these files are properly secured from being accessed by regular users as well.

In general, the best approach is to not allow regular users to log into your MySQL Server system in the first place. Shell access should be restricted to the system's admin accounts, access to the MySQL server should strictly take place via the MySQL Client/Server protocol. Which, by the way, is not using encryption by default — make sure to use SSL or an SSH tunnel when accessing a MySQL server through an untrusted network. Otherwise you may also reveal confidential information like user passwords to unauthorized entities...

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the Schedule page on the MySQL Forge for the detailed agenda, including the detailed session abstracts and speaker bios. These talks will soon appear in the general FOSDEM schedule, too. If you are interested in MySQL and any of the topics above, consider visiting us in Room AW1.126! Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organizers happily accept donations and sponsorships.

In addition to the Developer Room, MySQL will share a project desk with the OpenSolaris community. We are still looking for at least one more volunteer that would help us with manning the desk! If you are interested in helping out (2 hours at a minimum), please drop me a line!

My colleague Joerg Moellenkamp stepped up and established the HHOSUG - a local OpenSolaris User Group here in Hamburg, Germany. It has a web-home with discussion forums on Xing.com. Our first physical meetup will take place on Wednesday, 4th of February, 17:45. We will meet in the the meeting rooms at Sun's Hamburg offices (Nagelsweg 55, 20097 Hamburg). If you plan to attend, please RSVP here. We have the following topics on the agenda:

• Organizational issues
• Collecting ideas/suggestions for the HHOSUG: what shall this group aim for?
• Technical session: OpenSolaris 2008.11 internals (Time slider, pkg, etc)

Luckily, Wednesday is usually the day that I am in the office anyway, so I'll just stick around. I look forward to meeting many fellow OpenSolaris fans there

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)
• MySQL will have a project stand, that we will share with the OpenSolaris Community. We're still looking for one or two more volunteers that would help us manning the table! If you would like to help out, please register here!
• MySQL will have a developer room at FOSDEM on Sunday. We will be in Room AW1.126 (72 seats) and the session schedule looks great already! We're still working on the fine tuning and scheduling.
• We've almost finished with creating a Japanese version of Planet MySQL (some minor encoding quirks remain to be fixed) and I finally got rid of the remaining parts of code that still used MagpieRSS (only in the admin backend parts) - now everything uses SimplePie instead.
• Dups added the MySQL Buzz to Planet MySQL
• I'm also working on sending out invitations to various MySQL-related projects to represent and showcase their work at the DotOrg Pavilion of the MySQL Conference Exhibition Area. Currently we have confirmation for attendance from Drupal, phpMyAdmin and Sphinx. What other projects would you like to see there? I am open for suggestions/applications

Quite a lot of exciting stuff going on, and more to come. This is a great start into the new year!

While VirtualBox is available as a downloadable OpenSolaris package from the download page at virtualbox.org, I find it much more convenient to use the Package Manager GUI or pkg on the command line to install and update packages.

Sun provides a VirtualBox IPS package (and some others like Flash Player) from a separate "extras" repository. However, you need to obtain a key and SSL certificate before you can access this repository, which are available for free from https://pkg.sun.com/register/ after logging in with your Sun Online Account.

Once you obtained and installed these files in /var/pkg/ssl (detailed instructions are provided on the download page), you can add this repository as another "authority" and start looking at what packages are provided:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority \
            -k /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem \
            -c /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem \
            -O https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/extra extra
$ pkg list -a 'pkg://extra/*'
NAME (AUTHORITY)                              VERSION         STATE      UFIX
SUNWadmj (extra)                              0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWjsnmp (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbapi (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbcou (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbdev (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
virtualbox (extra)                            2.0.6-0.101     known      ----
virtualbox/kernel (extra)                     2.0.6-0.101     known      ----
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              9.0.125-0.101   known      ----

So there is not that much to download by now - some additional Java packages and the Flash plugin for Firefox. There is no package for VirtualBox 2.1.0 yet, but I hope this will be updated soon...

FOSDEM 2009, one of the biggest European Open Source conferences, will take place on February 7-8 in Brussels, Belgium. Today I received a confirmation from the organizers: MySQL will have a developer room on Sunday, the 8th! This is very cool.

My idea was to organize some kind of MySQL mini-conference, with a focus on developers and DBAs. I am going to send out a more formal CfP soon, but if you have any ideas or suggestions for a talks/sessions already, please get in touch with me!

In addition to the devroom, I have also been invited to give a talk about MySQL High Availability solutions in the conference main track. In this talk I plan to cover some commonly used HA setups for MySQL, including the OSS components/tools (for Linux and OpenSolaris) involved. I will mention MySQL Cluster as well, explaining the relationship and architecture of MySQL Server and NDB Cluster. I hope this will be of interest to the audience.

I also submitted two lightning talk proposals: "New features in MySQL 5.1" and one about "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project", but I won't know if these were accepted until the end of December...

See you there!

As noted in my previous blog posting, I manged to revive my old Logitech TrackMan Marble FX on Linux (openSuSE 11.1b4), using a Serial-to-USB dongle with a Prolific PL2303 chip. But I also use OpenSolaris on my Laptop quite frequently (currently testing the upcoming 2008.11 release), so I investigated if it would be possible to enable the trackball there as well.

Luckily, the Driver Manager listed the plugged in adapter and the correct driver (usbsprl) was loaded already. Now the real challenge was finding out which device node to use. Some research revealed that the driver actually comes with a manual page , which indicated that /dev/term/0 was the correct device name.

Lo and behold, I copied the InputDevice section from my Linux xorg.conf file into the OpenSolaris one, replaced the Device parameter with the appropriate one and restarted the X server. Immediate success! Now I can enjoy using my most favourite input device on OpenSolaris as well.

I recently installed the last  release candidate version of OpenSolaris 2008.11 (ISO image available from here) and I am happy to note that the audiohd driver now supports the Intel soundchip (82891H) in my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 out of the box! This was one of the glitches I observed with 2008.05. In general, I am very impressed by the OpenSolaris driver support for this particular laptop - everything except for bluetooth is supported now. On the downside, suspending to RAM still fails for me, but I have not looked into this very deeply yet.

But what good is a working sound driver, if you don't have apps that produce sounds? Be default, the media players included in the distribution lack support for most codecs, e.g. MP3 or video formats. This is not much different from most Linux distributions, as these codecs are usually protected by patents or proprietary licenses which require the user to install these separately. Here are some hints on how to enable better multimedia support on OpenSolaris.

The Observatory has a detailed article on how to add the free MP3 gstreamer codec from Fluendo, so all applications that use the gstreamer API (e.g. Songbird) will be able to play back MP3 files.

If you want full multimedia support and an choice of video players/codecs, you should add the Life With Solaris (LWS) package repository to the package manager:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000/ pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp
$ pfexec packagemanager

You will now be able to choose a new package repository from the dropdown list, which allows you to select players and codecs for download/installation. The packages will be installed in /opt/LWS, so you need to add /opt/LWS/bin to your $PATH, if you want to start the applications from the command line. But the packages will create menu entries for the GNOME desktop as well.

Enjoy!

While Colin beat me in blogging about Project Kenai, I think I can still provide some additional background information about this new project hosting service from Sun.

If you are a maintainer of an Open Source project, you currently have plenty of choice when it comes to getting your project hosted for free. One criterion could be your software configuration management system (SCM) of choice.

Some of the hosting services that I am currently aware of and the choice of SCM they offer include:

• BitBucket (Mercurial)
• Collab.net (Subversion)
• github (Git)
• GoogleCode (Subversion)
• Launchpad (Bazaar)
• Sourceforge.net (CVS, Subversion)

As disclosed by Tim Bray some days ago, there now is another option - Kenai is open for project hosting (currently by invitation only)! In his blog post, he interviews Nick Sieger, one of the developers behind this project about their motivation and intentions:

We need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications.

In a nutshell, Kenai is a platform for:

• Developer collaboration
• Communities of connected developers
• Integrated collaboration services stack

Some of the features that are currently available include:

• SCM services using Subversion and Mercurial
• Bug Tracking (Bugzilla)
• Forums
• Wikis
• Mailing Lists (using Sympa)

Reading the interview with Nick and looking at some presentations slides for RailsConf from Fernando Castano (a jRuby and Database performance engineer at Sun and another member of the project team),  I was able to gather a list of the tools and technologies they used to build Kenai:

• Apache2, mod_proxy_balancer
• Ruby on Rails (running on jRuby)
• Glassfish Java application server
• MySQL 5.0
• Apache Solr for search
• memcached

I found it interesting that they decided to deploy and run the Rails application as a war file within the Glassfish application server (using Warbler). By the way, the fabolous OpenSUSE Build Service is a Rails application, too! So far, the entire site is powered by a single MySQL instance with query cache enabled.

The project is hosted on the following infrastructure:

• Sun Fire T2000 for (for web and application serving)
• Sun Fire X4500 for Storage
• OpenSolaris Nevada (Zones/Containers, SMF)
• ZFS (9.7 TB RAIDz, Snapshots, NFS)
• Coolstack & Blastwave packages

You should check out Fernando's presentation for more technical details, tuning info and how they benchmarked the setup - it contains a number of useful tuning hints and performance graphs.

Last time I checked, 27 Projects have joined so far (e.g. jRuby, xVM Server). Kenai itself is developed on Kenai. It's going to be interesting what other projects will find their home there.

Nick also talked a bit about their future near term plans: to improve the usability and feature set, incrementally improve the site navigation and layout and adding support for hosting files/release downloads. They also consider offering Jira as an option to Bugzilla for bug tracking and Git as another SCM option.

There is an IRC channel #projectkenai on freenode.net, to get in touch with the developers directly. The mailing list for the Project Kenai site itself, is users@help.kenai.com - you can subscribe to this list here.

Tomorrow (Thursday, 11th of September) at 9:00 PST/16:00 UTC/17:00 GMT/18:00 CET, there will be an new free MySQL University Session. MySQL University started as an internal training program for MySQL engineers, to share and spread knowledge about their areas of expertise and has been available to the public for quite some time now. It covers a wide range of technical topics around the MySQL Server and usually takes place once per week.

For the first time, the presentation will not be performed by (former) MySQL employees/developers, but by two of our "Sun Classic" colleagues: Jyri Virkki (OpenSolaris Web Stack community lead) and Murthy Chintalapati (Sr Engineering Manager, Web Stack development) will talk about the OpenSolaris Web Stack:

OpenSolaris Web Stack is an OpenSolaris project and community building an integrated stack of popular open source web tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP and Ruby On Rails optimized for Solaris platform. This session introduces OpenSolaris Web Stack, its status and future development including addition of newer technologies such as lighttpd, Varnish etc., as well as the ease of use features for developers and deployers. We will also be discussing an experimental web stack IPS package repository and it could be leveraged to build and make available popular end user applications such as Drupal.

MySQL University sessions are free to attend - all you need is an IRC client (to post your questions and comments) and an audio player capable of playing back an OGG audio stream, so you can listen to what is being said. See the Instructions for Attendees on the MySQL University pages for more information on how to log in and attend. The audio stream will be recorded and published on the MySQL University pages for later consumption, in case you can't make it or want to listen to a previous session.