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Network interface vanity naming lets you change the name used to refer to a network interface. Anyone who manages Solaris (or any other Linux/UNIX) servers is familiar with the network naming scheme and knows how it can be a bit challenging to remember which nic to look at when troubleshooting a problem, especially on servers and/or networks you don’t deal with frequently. In the past you may have had something like this:

Of course, this may vary greatly between your servers. Some may have more or fewer interfaces, others machines will have interface names that differ based on the hardware such as the X4100/x4200 m2 series, which have two nge interfaces and two e1000g interfaces (which I find annoying, but with vanity names a lot of that type of pain goes away). When the code from the OpenSolaris Vanity Naming project hits the street (probably a month or so for OpenSolaris Community Edition users), you will be able to use dladm to provide an alias that will work for all typical commands.

Once you have set your vanity names up like this:

root@host# dladm rename-link e1000g0 admin

root@host# dladm rename-link e1000g1 backup

root@host# dladm rename-link e1000g2 web

It will be really nice to be able to use commands like:

root@host# ifconfig backup

or

root@host# snoop -d web

Check out Sebastien Roy’s blog post for more details.

I signed up today to run the Geisinger Humdinger 7.1 mile trail race on March 1st. It starts out with a fairly flat section for about a mile, and then has about 400 feet of climb over the next mile. The rest of the course is a bunch of up and down sections, with a steep descent during the last two miles. I’ve been training on pretty flat surfaces for the last few months, so I better start getting in some hills soon or it will be ugly.

As part of my job, I spend some time following the server virtualization market. A few months ago, I was talking with one of our clients, and was asked about what solutions I would recommend for building a new virtualized infrastructure. I mentioned that I thought VMWare was really the de facto leader for any broad enterprise virtualization effort, but Xen was certainly gaining some steam and might be able compete reasonably well with VMWare in the next two years. Based off what I’ve seen over the last two months (Oracle and Sun joining up in a big way, along with most major Linux vendors), I think Xen is gaining even more momentum, and probably will be competitive with VMWare for lots of virtualization needs within the next year.

I think Xen has a reasonable product line now for certain situations, but a lot of VMWare’s value is a product set honed over thousands of deployments, broad hardware support, lots of ISV support for products running on VMWare as well as add-ons products for managing VMWware environments, and a ton of community-generated information regarding workarounds and best practice patterns. Xen has a much more limited set of supported hardware and guest OSes, and an ISV community that is fairly small in size.

For “one stop news shopping” of the virtualization market, I highly recommend people set their RSS readers to follow virtualization.info.

While there are many wonderful things I like about Solaris (DTrace, Zones, ZFS, SMF,…), I’ve never been really thrilled with the state of patching.  One of the Sun blogs on patch management recently posted an overview of the different Sun and 3rd party patch management tools.  The comments came rolling in, and it seems like the clear winner from the community side is pca.  Check out the discussion and add your comments.

On a brighter note, I’ve been following the development of the new packaging system (IPS) that will be used in Solaris 11, and that should make a whole host of package and patch management problems go away.

Here are the steps I have used in the past to configure some Centos boxes being used as LoadRunner load generators to get better performance when trying to generate a lot of traffic.

Note: these were machines that were only accessible from within a very limited environment, I don’t think these suggestions are good from a security perspective.

1) Increase the available TCP ports used for outbound connections
edit etc/sysctl.conf and add
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000

To apply the change immediately:
root@host# sysctl net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range=”1024 65000″

2) Disable IP Tables

use the service and chkconf commands to stop the service and disable it from starting at boot

root@host# service iptables save
root@host# service iptables stop
root@host# chkconfig iptables off

3) Disable Selinux
edit /etc/selinux/config and change the selinux line to be:

SELINUX=disabled

and reboot.

To apply the change immediately, use:

root@host# echo 0 >/selinux/enforce

1) Increase the available TCP ports used for outbound connections
edit etc/sysctl.conf and add
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000

To apply the change immediately:
root@host# sysctl net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range=”1024 65000″

I’m going to watch the movie Spirit of the Marathon on Thurs evening at 7:30.  If you are interested in running or just enjoy watching personal stories of triumph, see if it is available at a theater near you.

Today, while eating lunch with my friends/coworkers, we had an interesting discussion about morals in different situations. I remembered reading about a morality quiz a week or two ago. Some quick googling found the quiz at philosophersnet called Morality Play. I spent about two minutes flipping through some questions, and it made me squirm.

Before starting the quiz, I thought my own sense of morals was fairly rational and self-consistent. As I clicked through the questions,I could see my answers waver in response to very minor differences in what was fundamentally the same basic scenario. I found this both mildly disturbing and humbling. A few of my coworkers tried the quiz and became so uncomfortable that they had to stop part way through.

Sample Question

Q: A charity collection takes place in your office. For every UK£10.00 given, a blind person’s sight is restored. Instead of donating UK£10.00, you use the money to treat yourself to a cocktail after work. Are you morally responsible for the continued blindness of the person who would have been treated had you made the donation?

A. Responsible/Partly Responsible/Not Responsible

What do you find out?

If you complete the quiz, it presents a report of what factors you tend to consider when making moral decisions. The factors that this quiz measured are:

• Geographical distance (someone next door versus the other side of the world)
• Family Relatedness (your mother or child versus a stranger)
• Acts and Omissions (if performing an action is better/worse than doing nothing)
• Scale (hurting 1 to save 10 different than hurting 500 to save 50000)
• Cultural distance (someone from a similar culture versus a very different culture)

I really recommend you give the quiz a shot, it takes about 10 minutes and definitely will get you thinking.

Unlike the “free credit reports (if you sign up for our $$$ credit monitoring service, sucka!)” provider that you see ads for plastered all over TV, the real place to get your free yearly credit reports as mandated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act is www.annualcreditreport.com. Check out the Wikipedia article for more details. I just ran mine, and you have to dodge a few credit monitoring ads when you are viewing your report at each of the three providers, but overall it was quick and relatively pain-free. It is definitely a good idea to check at least once a year to make sure nobody is stealing your credit identity and the credit reporting providers haven’t goofed up.

I just finished watching the last DVD of the Veronica Mars series. In a nutshell, it is a show about a kick-ass teenage (high-school -> college) girl who works with her private investigator dad and ends up using her PI skills to solve tons of mysteries, as well as dealing with family, friendship, and social issues. The plots and characters are interesting, nothing is ever as it seems in the beginning, and the dialog is fantastic. I think this series ranks up with the new Battlestar Galactica as one of my all-time favorite TV shows. Unfortunately, it was canceled towards the end of the 3rd season.

I discovered the series while reading a post by Bill Kratzer made about the show and was really intrigued seeing Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon’s comments about how much they enjoyed Veronica.

What: HARRC Winter Series 5k

Where: Harrisburg East Shore YMCA

When: Jan 19th 9:00 AM

Executive Summary: nice small race, fairly flat (1 small down, 1 small up section), 5th overall, 19:57

I arrived at the East Shore YMCA just after 8:30 to register for the race. Given the brisk (high-20s) temperatures, it was fantastic to have the registration process in a nice heated building with real restrooms. I caught up with a few people I’ve met from the HARRC and then spied Nate. Nate and I went for a mile or so easy warm-up, ditched our extra gear, and headed to the starting area. We had pretty close to perfect timing, only needing to wait two minutes or so before the start of the race.

Marge Lebo, the race organizer, gave a few comments on the course, said a quick thanks, and turned it over to one of the people from the charity that the race was supporting. The “charity guy” spoke for a few seconds, and then we were off. It is always pleasant when the pre-start formalities are quick.

The course started on the upper level sidewalk heading south towards the Market Street Bridge. After just over a quarter-mile, we passed the bridge, headed down the hill, and then did a 150 degree turn so we were running north on the lower level sidewalk next to the river. There were occasionally small patches of ice, but in general the surface conditions were pretty good. I hit the first mile in 6:09.

The second mile continues along the lower-level of the river and ends as you are climbing up the hill to get back to street level. As I went up the hill, I was in 4th place (3rd was probably 40-50 seconds ahead), and I saw Steve Whittle taking pictures. After cresting the hill, I started turning right to head back towards the starting area. After about 20 feet, I could hear someone yelling “left, left”. I turned back and saw Steve pointing towards some cones that were about a hundred yards away. I also saw Gary Grobeman, who had now moved into 4th place, heading towards the cones. I did a quick 180 turn and headed towards the cones. 2nd mile split was 6:44.

The 3rd mile was nice and flat along the upper-level section. After looping around the cones, I could see Gary was pulling farther away from me, and it looked like I had about 15-20 seconds on the next runners behind me. I was sort of stuck in a no-man’s land and did my best to make sure I kept a decent pace up to the finish. I looked behind me a few times, but couldn’t see anyone moving in on my position and held the effort pretty steady. As I got close to the finish area and saw the clock ticking towards 20:00, I sprinted in the last 80 yards or so to register a 19:57 final time. 3rd mile split was 6:35.

I was fairly happy with the race, but hope I can mentally dig a little deeper next time. My average heart rate was 4 BPM lower (175 versus 179 at the Thanksgiving 5k). I’m also a a bit frustrated at the small course error I made, but it is tough in a small race if there aren’t a lot of people around you. Thanks to Gary and Steve for yelling and getting me back on track, I would have felt horrible (and been disqualified) if I accidentally cut out 300 yards. Checking the Garmin tracks, it looks like I probably cost myself about 8 seconds.

The post-race festivities were held back in the warmth at the YMCA. They had plenty of good food and drinks. I received a pair of gloves (I traded them to Nate for a blanket, since he needed a warmer pair of gloves) for getting 5th overall, and 1st in the 30-39 age group, which was pretty cool. They also gave away a bunch of door prizes to some lucky folks. Thanks to Marge Lebo and the volunteers for putting together a nice race.