Archive
Posts from 2006
Concert review The Cult
I grew up listening to hard rock in the 80s, and to this day, this is still my favorite decade for music. The music was hard, the lyrics were original, and the stage antics at most hair band concerts was itself worth the price of admission. One band that was right in the middle of the 1980s music revolution was The Cult. A few months ago I got the chance to see The Cult play at a small local venue…
$ read more →Measuring website latency with http_ping
A year or so ago, I modified my ldap-ping.pl script to create a script (http-ping.p l) that would measure the time it took to retrieve a specific URI from a web server. While scouring the OpenBSD ports collection for website monitoring tools, I came across http_ping. This is a great tool for measuring the time it takes to retrieve a URI, and is a far superior tool to the one I wrote. Here is an example of http_ping in action: There are all kinds of nifty pieces of software stashed away in the OpenBSD ports collection, and I am on a mission to locate and blog about each and every one of them…
$ read more →Switching jobs
After almost four years with my current employer, I have decided to move on. I found leaving my current job somewhat difficult, since I work with some incredibly talented people (I worked with people that could tell you the history of the world, how to make the perfect spinache quiche, and several individuals that could recite from memory the layout of the memory map that is passed between the BIOS/EFI and the kernel on x86 platforms). It is also hard leaving an environment you poured lots of nights and weekends into, but at the end of the day I guess you shouldn't become attached to the bits you helped change. Testing new waters should be awesome, and I can't wait to get back into the trenches in my new role…
$ read more →Extracting SMF site manifests
SMF is one of the new features in Solaris 10, and provides the infrastructure needed to start and stop all of the processes that make up a useful system. SMF maintains a repository to store a variety of meta data to describe a service, and this information includes the state of a given service. The state of a service can be enabled if the service is supposed to start when the system boots, or disabled if the service isn't supposed to start when the system boots. I am a big fan of disabling every service that isn't needed to make the server perform it's function, and this is one area where I think SMF shines…
$ read more →Displaying CPU capabilities with Solaris
Solaris has been a 64-bit operating system for longer than I can recall. In addition to supporting 64-bit applications, Solaris also supports 32-bit applications, and is capable of running as a 32-bit entity on 32-bit platforms. If you need to see if 32- or 64-bit applications are supported on a given platform, you can run isainfo with the "-v" option: If you would like to see which hardware capabilities (e.g., MMX extensions) are available, you can run isalist: If you are curious what the optimal instruction set is for your platform, you can run optisa with the output of isalist as the argument: Tis all about knowing what your platform is capable of!
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