williamhathaway.com

A lot of times I hear “don’t worry, we have support for product X” when talking to customers and I find a lot of people consider the ability to get support for a product to be more of a  yes/no checkbox versus a what I feel tends to be more a continuum.

To start off with, I’d like to layout my primary definition of product support as “the ability to resolve problems encountered with the product”.  I know some people may add “the ability to get new versions”, but I’m putting that to the side for now, since that isn’t a very nuanced problem (essentially solved with $ alone for a support agreement if commercial-only software).  I also know some people just use support as “someone to blame so I can slip out of all responsibility despite my job”, but I’ll be ignoring those folks.

For hardware products where you might need to get a replacement for failing disks, motherboards, etc, having support can certainly be a yes/no type answer (although another option might be just buying some extra components that you know are likely need replacing).

For software, besides the standard vendor support contracts available, I think of the following aspects of support:

• internal employees/contractors – their knowledge of the overall problem space as well as the specific products used.
• software maturity – the important thing here isn’t just how long it has been around, but how widely used is the functionality you want to implement.
• platform choice – this doesn’t matter for some generic Java services, but if the product is a compiled program that interacts with the operating system a lot,  make sure there are enough other customers using the same operating system as you.  I’ve seen cases where a product was extremely widely used, but if you were one of the handful running the product on an unpopular platform (e.g. AIX), your chance of having an undiscovered problem and your time to problem resolution was on average much higher than if you were using one of the more popular platforms.  If you can’t find much evidence of people running a product on your platform of choice, consider choosing a different product or if the specific product is key to your organization, consider running it on the vendor’s platform of choice.
• community – are there active mailing lists/forums/blogs/irc channels for people using this product?
• documentation (both official and unofficial) – how comprehensive in breadth and depth?
• boutique consultants – smaller organizations like Percona (MySQL) or people like Richard Elling (ZFS/Storage) may be able to provide expert assistance in a targeted and quick manner, often going much deeper than typical vendor support and much faster to engage than  larger professional service organizations

I think your real support level is made up by all the factors above and they should be considered when evaluating a product’s overall suitability for your organization, don’t think of it just as a checkbox.

A co-worker was having trouble running

# pkgrm SUNWfontconfig-root

It was returning:

## Removing pathnames in class <manifest>
svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default remains enabled; aborting
pkgrm: ERROR: class action script did not complete successfully

Removal of <SUNWfontconfig-root> failed.

To troubleshoot it, we added the -v option to pkgrm so it would show the scripts it was running:

# pkgrm -v SUNWfontconfig-root

+ [  !=  -a  != / ]
+ [ -r /etc/svc/volatile/repository_door ]
smf_alive=yes
SVCPROP=/usr/bin/svcprop
+ read mfst
+ [ yes = yes ]
+ /usr/sbin/svccfg inventory /var/svc/manifest/application/font/fc-cache.xml
ENTITIES=svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default
svc:/application/font/fc-cache
+ /usr/bin/svcprop -p general/enabled svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default
en_p=true
+ /usr/bin/svcprop -p general_ovr/enabled svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default
en_o=
+ [ true = true -o  = true ]
+ echo svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default remains enabled; aborting
svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default remains enabled; aborting
+ exit 1
pkgrm: ERROR: class action script did not complete successfully

Ok, now we can see the problem.  We need to change the general/enabled property of the service to false and refresh the service.

# svccfg -s   svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default setprop general/enabled = false

# svcadm refresh font/fc-cache:default

Verify that it took:

# /usr/bin/svcprop -p general/enabled svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default

false

That looks good.  Now we can retry the package removal:

# pkgrm SUNWfontconfig-root

and it worked!

It has been nice watching connect.garmin.com finally start taking shape. Their team has been struggling for the last year and a half with missed deadline after missed deadline, lame functionality and weak excuses on their blog but it looks like they have recently been getting their act together. I noticed you can now upload from all the Garmin fitness products and they have working RSS feeds. There are still a few rough edges, but I am glad to see them making significant progress.

My Garmin RSS feed

Appalachian Trail

I’ve been hitting the Appalachian Trail for runs very frequently over the last month (including 3x in the last 8 days), and I’ve noticed it is getting mentally and physically easier. When I first started running there I was spending a lot of time focusing on the terrain right in front of me and felt like I was spending 90% of my brain cycles just making sure I didn’t trip over a root, rock, or uneven ground.

I realized today during my run that I was still looking at the ground a few steps ahead of me, but I felt like I was mentally handling it all in the background except for a few places where it was particularly tricky. It was nice being able to just get lost in my thoughts during the run.   I can also feel my ankles are much more stable when I am landing on uneven terrain.

The section I like to run on is fairly tame, but I think as my skills grow I’ll start to experiment with running on tougher trails.

On my default OpenSolaris 2009.06 image I installed memcached with:

pkg install SUNWmemcached

and then tried to get it running with:

svcadm enable memcached

It kept on dieing and respawning and I saw the log file (/var/svc/log/application-database-memcached\:default.log) growing with lines like the following

[ Jun  1 14:42:34 Enabled. ]
[ Jun  1 14:42:34 Executing start method ("/lib/svc/method/memcached start"). ]
can’t run as root without the -u switch
[ Jun  1 14:42:35 Method "start" exited with status 0. ]

So basically memcached was complaining that it was starting as root and not being told to switch to another user.  To fix this I had to tell it to switch to the ‘nobody’ user when starting.  Here are the steps I used:

# tell memcached to run as the user ‘nobody’ and set the max memory to 1024M, you need to at least have

# -u nobody (or some other account that exists on the system)

svccfg -s memcached setprop memcached/options= ‘(“-u” “nobody” “-m” “1024″)’

svcadm refresh memcached

svcadm disable memcached

svcadm enable memcached

The memcached man page in OpenSolaris sort of mentions you need to do this towards the end, but I think it is poor form for the server to be unable to run by using the default SMF configuration.  I will try to get an RFE to at least have the ‘-u nobody’ option set by default.

I downloaded the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release and installed it on top of VirtualBox over lunch.   The previous release (2008.11) had a lot of good desktop support, this version has added a lot of enterprise-class features like automated installations, UltraSPARC support, multi-protocol SCSI target (COMSTAR), crazy-cool network virtualization (Crossbow) and much more.  You can check out the full set of new features at: http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/features/whats-new/200906/

While there is always room for improvement, I think given OpenSolaris’ design, feature set,  and maturity it is now in a place where I’d consider it a viable option for production deployments on x64 systems.  I’d still hold off for a little while on SPARC since I think it may take a bit for all the auto-install and boot-related code to gain maturity there.

the iron is cable-locked to the ironing board.  Welcome to the Best Western in Morgantown, WV!

Tabacco sign on a McDonald's

I saw this when stopping on my drive back from West Virgina this afternoon.  The McDonald’s was at a travel plaza and shared  space with a small convenience store.

Venn diagram of UNIX and graffiti enthusthiasts

I came across this on a couple of buildings, fence posts, and the sidewalk while walking around Morgantown.

Has anyone seen UNIX-like graffiti tagging elsewhere?

UNIX graffiti in Morgantown, WV

I just stumbled onto a site that lists some restaurants close to Harrisburg:

http://www.dineoutharrisburg.com

Unfortunately, they also don’t list casual places like Neato Burrito, one of my favs.  Here is the snippet from their website FAQ:

Why is “X” restaurant not listed?
At DineOutHarrisburg we believe in listing restaurants on several criteria. 1) The restaurant has table service (waiters and waitresses) and not just a casual lunch ordering area. 2) The restaurant is within a 15 mile radius of Harrisburg. We believe the combination of food and service is what makes a successful restaurant.

–

I think it would be nice if they would loosen the restriction and include casual places, I’d more inclined to use their site.