Parolski.com

NWAM (Network Auto Magic) is a very easy way of getting a DHCP lease on OpenSolaris. It runs as a service, enabled by default on install, which will automatically try and get you a DHCP address when Solaris detects that you plugged your ethernet cable in! To most people thats nothing special, but theres more to it.

You can also use it to automatically configure a static IP address upon boot too.

Simply edit the file /etc/nwam/llp to your desired settings. For example:

e1000g0   static   192.168.0.45/24

Easy!

The /24 part of that string represents the netmask. in this case, it would be expressed as 255.255.255.0 in decimal notation.

Then create /etc/defaultrouter so that your machine can reach the outside world! For example…

192.168.0.1

…as this is the address of the router on my LAN
Finally, create the /etc/resolv.conf file, so that the OS knows where to look to resolve DNS names!

On my LAN , this would be:

nameserver   192.168.0.1

If your still having trouble resolving host names, you may need to check that the /etc/nsswitch.conf file reflects the fact that you want to look in both files and the DNS to resolve host names. The hosts and ipnodes entries should look like this:

hosts:        files dns
ipnodes:      files dns

Once all that is done you can simply restart the NWAM service:

pfexec svcadm restart nwam

Oracle recently made a set of presentations which outlined what their strategy was in terms of hardware, software, markets etc.. Each speaker had a slide show to accompany their talks, and each of the slideshows was quite extensive.

Well, all but one. Larry’s!

His slideshow has one slide; a picture of a racing yacht with Oracle and Sun logos on it! This for me sums up his character. Hes got a ton of energy and sees his company more like something that he needs to guide and be successful with, and at the same time looks good whilst doing it!

In this respect, Oracle have made it very clear what they want to do with the portfolio they have acquired from Sun, and this does include investing heavily in SPARC processors. Given the kind of performance we saw with the T1000 on Heanets review, I’m personally looking forward to the day when Oracle manage to further commoditise this cool hardware

According to this blog post from the SourceForge team, IP addresses from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria will be blocked from accessing the site.

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

I can appreciate that these nations have been placed under sanction, but theres a few things that the US gov should probably keep in mind:

1. Its very easy to get around this denial of access: just use an open proxy from an IP thats not banned
2. How does the US gov measure whether or not a site is major enough to warrant putting specific restrictions on its export?  Surely the correct measure would be to determine how useful the code is, as opposed to the volume? With this in mind, surely every Linux distribution should also ban those IPs?
3. Will the US gov now prosecute any bloggers/ “small scale” producers of code who don’t conform to this law?

Bellow is a picture of a new type of skimmer being used in the USA use to skim ATM cards. The construction is HIGHLY convincing, and the placement of the pinhole camera is quite something! Even the tone of the colour of  the original receiver has been matched!

Thankfully, many ATMs in the UK use  a recess instead of a protrusion, so it should be more difficult to develop a device which fully fills the gap in a convincing manner.

This little box seems to be quite far ahead of its time. I can imagine that there must be so many futurologist out there just waiting to see their ideas come into the mainstream, and then jump for joy when it finally does!

It has been announced today that approval has finally been given for Oracle to merge with Sun Microsystems. The process began in September 2009 which means that its been long enough for plenty of rumours to go around about whats going to happen both internally with head count cuts, and of course with the product line itself. Most importantly, the people with power to make decisions in these two structures now actually have the opportunity to go ahead and make those decisions.

If Larry is true to his word about what he sees for the future of the Sun product line, I for one would certainly say that the future is going to be fairly bright.

Mr Ellisons (CEO of Oracle) own words:

“We are keeping everything. We are keeping tape, we are keeping storage, we are keeping x86 technology, we’re keeping SPARC technology, we’re going to increase the investment in it…”

“…we are NOT going to spin anything off.”

The discussions about improving data center power consumption efficiency and increasing demand for online services place the T-series equipment very well for those who know just how good they are. Coupled with the fact that Sun had famously invested early in the R+D for this kind of technology, theres also a great opportunity to get OpenSolaris beefed up in terms of packages and installers, and deployed in these environments.

I’m looking forward to seeing how its all going to pan out!

Python comes with an HTTP server built in, making sharing directories on your *nix machines as easy as:

anton@opensolaris:~/mess/test$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 …
localhost – - [26/Sep/2009 00:23:47] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 -
localhost – - [26/Sep/2009 00:24:24] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 -

So now when we go to localhost:8000 , we get the directory!:

anton@opensolaris:~/mess$ lynx -dump localhost:8000
Directory listing for /
__________________________________________________________________

* [1]lalala
__________________________________________________________________

References

1. http://localhost:8000/lalala

…or…

anton@opensolaris:~$ lynx -source localhost:8000
<title>Directory listing for /</title>
<h2>Directory listing for /</h2>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href=”lalala”>lalala</a>
</ul>
<hr>

…for those of you that want to see the source it produced! A very quick short term solution if you don’t want to go about setting up apache or change your apache settings!

Its not as boring as you think, but you’ll HAVE to do it when you don’t have a windex file and want to search using man -k :

anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
/usr/share/man/windex: No such file or directory

To get round this, we simply go ahead and create the index with catman:

anton@opensolaris:/$ pfexec time catman -w

real        2.9
user        1.8
sys         0.1

Its pretty quick, and you get left with a little index in /usr/share/man/windex. Its just an ascii version of all the names of your manpages, plus a one line summary of what each one does:

1        1 (3openssl)    - OpenSSL configuration functions
1        1 (3openssl)    - OpenSSL configuration functions
1394        ieee1394 (7d)    - Solaris IEEE-1394 Architecture
2        2 (3openssl)    - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2        2 (3openssl)    - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2        2 (3openssl)    - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2.1        EasyTAG (1)    - Tag editor for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files
2_F32_Sat    mlib_SignalConvertShift_U8_S8_Sat (3mlib)   – data type convert
with shifting
5.0        MySQL (1)    - MySQL RDBMS version 5.0 for Solaris
6to4        tun (7m)    - tunneling STREAMS module
6to4relay    6to4relay (1m)    - administer configuration for 6to4 relay router
communication
6to4tun     tun (7m)    - tunneling STREAMS module
7-Zip        7-Zip (1)    - A file archiver with highest compression ratio

So now when you do your man -k , you’ll get something useful!:

anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
bootadm     bootadm (1m)    - manage bootability of GRUB-enabled operating system
grub        grub (5)    - GRand Unified Bootloader software on Solaris
installgrub    installgrub (1m)    – install GRUB in a disk partition or a floppy

Crucially you only want to do catman -w , otherwise you’ll be reformatting all your manpages!

From the man page of catman:

-w                  Only create the windex database that  is
used  by whatis(1) and the man(1) -f and
-k options.  No manual  reformatting  is
done.

I didn’t discover this one, credit to  Schneier for finding it.

The conversation goes something like this:

“Here,” dad to girl, “Get your ID out and have it with your ticket.”

“Excuse me, sir,” said the TSA officer, pointing to the young female, “She does not need to have her ID out, she’s a minor.”

Dad: “How do you know she’s a minor if you don’t look at her ID?”

…. (silence as everyone waits for answer)….

Dad again: “Kind of a hole in the system, isn’t it?”

TSA Officer, voice lowered … “There are a LOT of holes in the system, sir.” … walks away.

Young girl, “Good one, dad. Now tell her our name is LADEN and see what happens!”

Reminds me of the classic Kepner Tregoe quesiton; good, but good for what?

Fox news posted this map of the middle east recently. Take a look where Egypt is:

LOL, slight move there!

All credit to the arabist.net for finding that! (And indirectly, credit to Mandy)