williamhathaway.com

I mentioned last month that I had taken a quick look at the docs for the new Solaris 8 Migration Assistant (S8MA) product/project and it seemed pretty interesting.

The 30 second recap is you take a flash archive of a Solaris 8 SPARC box and then you create a special zone type on a Solaris 10 SPARC box and you can import the flash archive into a zone and easily virtualize the Solaris 8 machine (assuming it uses userland apps and not app-specific kernel modules).

Last week I was working with a customer and we gave S8MA a quick whirl. We did the following steps to prep:

1) Read through the documentation at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1759.1

2) Used jumpstart to build a new machine running Solaris 10 08/07 (aka update 4)

3) Downloaded the S8MA bundle from http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=470c4a45

4) Downloaded patches 125476-02 and 127111-03 from http://sunsolve.sun.com

5) Create a flar image of our Solaris 8 test machine and transfered it to our Solaris 10 machine

root@sol8 # flarcreate -n s8migtest -x /var/tmp -S -c /var/tmp/s8migtest.flar

We then performed the following steps:
1) Booted the S10 box to single user, installed the required patches and rebooted

root@sol10# patchadd 125476-02 127111-03

root@sol10# reboot

2) Added the 3 packages that contain the solaris8 branded zone bits (from the download)

root@sol10# cd s8ma-1_0-rr/Product

root@sol10# pkgadd -d . SUNWs8brandr SUNWs8brandu SUNWs8p2v

4) Built a zfs pool and created a /zones mount point

root@sol10# zpool create zfs c1t1d0

root@sol10# zfs create zfs/zones -o mountpoint=/zones -o atime=off

5) Use zonecfg to create a solaris8 branded zone (we’ll call it s8zone1)

root@sol10# cat zone.cfg

create -b
set zonepath=/zones/s8zone1
set brand=solaris8
set autoboot=true
set ip-type=shared
add net
set address=s8zone1
set physical=e1000g0
end

root@sol10# zonecfg -z s8zone1 -f zone.cfg

6) Use zoneadm to install the zone from the flar archive created earlier

(note the -u and -a options which are specific to solaris8 branded zones)

root@sol10# zoneadm -z s8zone1 install -u -a /path/to/s8migtest.flar

7) Run the p2v tool which adds extra package/patches and checks for /etc/system entries to migration to resource controls

root@sol10# /usr/lib/brand/solaris8/s8_p2v s8zone1

8) Boot the zone

# zoneadm -z s8zone1 boot

9) Login via zone console

# zlogin -C s8zone1

10) Check out the system

In our case we had a bit of a problem where the sysid program didn’t seem to work quite right, but that may have been an anomaly, once we set hostname and nameservice information by hand it worked like a champ.

Pre-race thoughts: I had never ran a marathon before, so wasn’t quite sure what to expect. My goals were:

1. Run smart by not going out too fast and pay attention to hydration and fuel
2. Finish unless encountering a bad injury
3. Break 4 hours (3:45 was my stretch goal)

My long runs over the past 3 months included a 14, 16, 2 x 18, and one 20 miler. I wasn’t doing specific marathon preparation, but a few weeks before the Harrisburg Marathon I figured I had enough fitness to give it a shot.

Weather: Great, a bit chilly at the start for my taste, but overall pretty nice for a marathon. Sure beats Chicago.

Course: Moderately flat except through miles 17-19 (Wildwood Park)

Run: Start was (obviously) really crowded, I was about 80% of the way to the back. I took my time getting to the chip mat.

1st mile: 9:42 Just barely jogging as everyone started moving which was ok since I wasn’t in a hurry. My left foot started bothering me for about .5 miles but then the pain went away. Next time I should just wait until 2-3 mins after the start to cross the mat and give people a chance to spread out more. That is the beauty of chip timing.

2nd mile: 8:40 People had spread out a bit. Started to get into a decent groove. Everyone was in a good mood, I could hear lots of chatter and laughing.

3rd->10th mile: between 8:20 and 8:38. Felt great. Trying to make sure I wasn’t going too fast. Was checking my HR and trying to keep it between 155 and 160.

11th mile: 8:51 some minor hills so I slowed down a bit. Talked to a guy going to Lehigh who is a tri-athelete. He was wearing a shirt pimping his friend’s web site http://www.runstoppable.com.

12th-16th miles: 8:23->8:36 Still feeling good, it was nice to be passing the 1/2 point. I saw Nate Powell volunteering near the 15th mile marker.

17th mile: 8:50 starting to feel fatigue building and mentally it was tough knowing I was starting the most hilly section.

18th-20th mile: 8:46 -> 8:51 the “rolling hills of Wildwood” seemed much bigger than I remembered from a 5k I ran there earlier. In retrospect the hills weren’t that bad, but I wouldn’t mind if they took this part out. I saw a lot of people really struggling here.

21st-24th mile: 8:49 -> 9:09 My turn to struggle. I was having a tough time mentally and physically. The Gatorade I was carrying started to not taste very good and I could feel a lot of fatigue building up in my legs. Jon and James rode along near me for a bunch of this part which really helped. I ended up ditching my fuel belt with Jon and taking water and gels at two of the water stops. (One of the water stops was unofficial, thanks kind-hearted person who setup a table).

25th mile: 8:35 When I started getting near the 24th mile marker my spirits started to rise and I was able to pick up the pace. I was passing quite a few people and feeling really good. I could hear people cheering for me as I approached the upcoming bridge to City Island.

26th mile: 8:06 My fastest mile of the race and it included climbing from the riverfront up a ~ 70 foot hill to the Walnut Street Bridge. I was feeling great and there was a lot of crowd support.

Final .2 miles: About a 7:30 pace (I didn’t stop the garmin right after the finish). The finish chute was such a welcome sight. Hearing the beep as my chip was recorded was the best sound I had heard in ages.

Final time: 3:48:09

Afterwards

I felt mentally and aerobically fine after finishing but my quads/hamstrings/lower back were aching horribly. I hung around with some friends and tried to force some food down and stretch. After about 20 mins some friends accompanied me as I hobbled back to my car. I made sure my legs and feet were ok enough to drive and then drove home. I drank a few slim-fasts, talked to my wife for a few minutes (she had a trip to Illinois and couldn’t attend the race) and then took a nap. I’m feeling a lot better now (about 3 hours after finishing) but am still sore. I was really glad I never “hit the wall” and I think a big part of that was forcing myself to take in some calories even when they weren’t particularly enjoyable.

Motion Based Stats

Thanks to:

• Jon and James for supporting me during the race, it was awesome being able to have a crew to help me out
• Mark, Ian, and Clare for cheering me towards the end
• Nate for volunteering
• My wife for not complaining when I disappear for large chunks of time to go running on the weekends

Update:  The race results are posted.  My chip time was 3:47:29.

Just about two hours to go until the 2007 Harrisburg Marathon starts.  I laid out all my gear last night (although I forgot my road-id until after I took the picture).  It is likely I won’t drink all the fluids since it will be fairly cold for the first hour or two.  Some of my friends will be biking around the race and offered to carry some gear for me, so I’m going to just carry two bottles with me and switch bottles as I need them.  The race offers Cytomax, but I don’t like the taste, and I’ve trained with Gatorade so I’d rather carry some with me than gamble with hydration/nutrition.  Thanks to all the volunteers and spectators for coming out and I hope everyone has a great race.

I received a company sponsored Verizon V740 cellular modem for my MacBook Pro today (ExpressCard format).  The user experience was seamless. I plugged the card in, a dialog box popped up saying the card had to be activated. I pressed ‘continue’ and the automatic activation took about a minute and then I was able to click on the icon and connect to the internet. No need to even load the CD that came with the card.

Cellular reception isn’t great in my house (I get one or two bars depending on the location), but I did two speed tests and got up to 1200 Kb/sec down and 256 Kb/sec up. The only thing that bugs me is there is a large green light on the top of the card which blinks when it is transmitting data and it is very distracting, especially in low-light conditions. Some electrical tape should do the trick nicely.

The card should be really helpful to me. I spend quite a bit of time traveling or at customer sites and in many locations it is difficult (and/or expensive) to get on a network. There are also times where over zealous content filtering proxies make it tough to get work done (a recent customer’s web proxies blocked all web pages that contained the word ‘proxy’ which made researching an LDAP problem involving proxy accounts difficult).

I just saw the news that the developer preview of Sun’s Project Indiana is available for download. Here are a couple of quick thoughts:

• The link for the ISO image points to Sun’s new version of the their download center, which means you just click on the link and it starts downloading: no login and license clicks are required. I’m glad they fixed this (the previous user experience was clunky at best), although it will be a while before all of Sun’s downloads are using the new version.
• It has the normal live CD experience where it boots into a usable desktop with the standard apps you would expect. There is also a link to run the installer if you want to install the bits on your hard drive.
• The installer was a great leap forward from the current Solaris 10 version. There were only a few screens and it was a smooth process.

I’d definitely invite anyone curious about the future of Solaris usability to take a look.

For people unfamiliar with Project Indiana, here is the sound bite from the main project page:

Project Indiana is working towards creating a binary distribution of an operating system built out of the OpenSolaris source code. The distribution is a point of integration for several current projects on OpenSolaris.org, including those to make the installation experience easier, to modernize the look and feel of OpenSolaris on the desktop, and to introduce a network-based package management system into Solaris.

The resulting distribution is a live-CD install image, and is fully permissible to be redistributed by anyone. It will also have the capability for developers to create their own, customized distribution based on Project Indiana. The first official release is due Spring 2008.