Working from Starbucks

Ok, so I finally had to do the geek-thing and take my laptop into starbucks last night.
I had nothing else to do while I waited for traffic to die down.

I always thought starbucks had open accesspoints, but I guessed wrong. As soon as I booted up my machine, I was welcomed by a login screen and internet usage packages, etc.

No worries, I'll find my way around that soon enought, but in the mean time I might as well do something productive. Lets just say that was on the of the most productive hours of work I've had in weeks. It was nice, no driveby conversations in my cube, no annoying IM messages with people asking me how to do their jobs.. very nice indeed.

It's a Beautiful day, so why am I blogging?

Well, only because it's 100 freakin' degrees outside. So I've made uses of my time inside this weekend. I've already installed solaris 10 on this laptop (I'm using now), and I'm in the process of installing solaris 11 (aka Nevada build 18) on my desktop.

Thought what the heck, I can roll back easy enough, why not see what new features are in some of the latest builds. While I'm at it, set up a better partitioning scheme so that I can take advantage of live upgrades. I can't wait till full Janus support is incorporated into some of these releases.

So you may be asking, why am I such a solaris freak?
To be honest, I have been a very devout Linux user for years. First Slackware, later Gentoo, but after getting my hands on solaris 10, I have really grown to like many of the new features. SMF makes starting and stop services a breeze, RBAC I would equate to sudo on roids, Dtrace, and Zones ..wow, I actually felt butter flies just typing that.

What Weekend?

Had a production database server crash on Saturday. :( 2 bad disks on 1 RAID array = bad news.
Spent the majority of Saturday diagnosing, then failing over to the back up systems (12+ hours just FYI).

Sunday, slept in (till 8am) my internal clock is off... But that's another story.
Spent most of the morning trouble shooting some issues on my desktop. Gnome just did not want to start and I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Turns out, I had some conflicting libraries installed and higher up on the PATH then the ones I wanted.

Oh well . .un installed the offending packages.. . Then well . .All of the packages from pkg-get.
Pkg-get is a nice tool, but I wish it gave the user more control over dependency installs and a few other things. As support for Solaris x64 grow, it's becoming easier to recompile things for 64bit support. Yeah so, I know that xmms doesn't run any faster. . and probably has larger binaries. . . but it's 64bit. (yeah I'm a loser) A few hours wasted compiling all my favorite tools like grep, lsof, pcre, xine, mplayer, xmms, openssl, rdesktop . . and I'm back where I need to be.

I have a love hate relationship with eBay. I love window shopping, but I hate the disappointment after someone snipes something right out from under you. Oh, well. . Two can play that game. I am now the prod owner of a Sun Netra X1.

Wow, it's been a long couple of weeks.

I'm trying to come down after almost a month straight of solid WORK.
70+ hour weeks really start to take a toll. Long story short, the
software vendor of our CRM app posted a wee hour alert of Biblical
proportions. We're talking total meltdown, nuclear disaster stuff .
..ok well really just the fact that JCE will
expire in a few days rendering all our our applications useless. So
in addition to moving 60+ production servers over 4 days (yes i did
some of the labor), and patching ~100 servers, I found time to go to
the snack machine for nourishment.

I kinda of miss blogging, I just hate that I have to sacrifice sleep
do surf now-a-days . . oh well, I'll leave you with a new toy I'm
playing with.
Use the account demo/demo