Entries by Joerg Moellenkamp

I didn´t wrote an article yesterday and this morning , albeit there was much to report. For example the Q-Layer acquisition. Or about the new IPMP in Opensolaris as a part of the Clearview project. But i´m really frustrated at the moment ... disappointed by the mankind.

As i wrote before, i visited my parents at christmas and friends for new years eve in a city nearby. As i prefered to travel by train i asked my brother to take my luggage by car. So far no problem. But on his journey a thief targeted his car (we don´t know when, why, where, we suspect on a rest stop). The consequence: A trolley with clothes (an expensive shirts and my best pair of shoes away, rest wasn´t that expensive) and my CEC2007 backpack was stolen from the luggage compartment. The real neckbreaker was the bag: 1 Wii, 2 Wiimotes, 3 games, 2 Nunchuks ... damage round about 400 Euro. Interestingly they left the balance board in the car. 2 minutes later a shock hit me as i remembered that i´ve put my camera in this bag as well: A Canon 40D, a wide-angle (stabilized - read: expensive) and n tele-photo (stabilized - read: expensive) lens, one tele-converter stolen. At the end all the stolen parts have an summarized value of .. well ... round about 3000 Euros. I hope you understand, i wasn´t in the mood to blog yesterday. BTW: It´s really disturbing, that there weren´t any signs of a break-in at the car except of a sluggish lock.

Dear thief, i hope the stroke will hit you while sitting on the toilet and the curse of everlasting stinking socks may hit your family for the rest of time. I hate you!

But to see the good things in the disaster: I thought about switching to Nikon ... now i can do the switch ... all left from my DSLR are two inexpensive primes. I´m glad that i postponed the switch to the L-class lenses again and again...

From the release notes of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE:

>The DTrace, a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework and dtrace(1) userland utility have been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

(via Tim Bray)

Ben Rockwood wrote a great article about the usage of Crossbows vnics and virtual switches in conjunctions with zones: Crossbow Experiements and Elation. A must-read.

An tweet on twitter lead me to some thoughts. The question in this tweet was "What will be after Linux?" At first this seems as a question of a Solaris fanboy and obviously you would expect that i would opt for Solaris in this article. I have my opinion but i won´t discuss it here. I won´t even give a hint because honestly spoken, i have no idea. It´s relatively easy to look 6 months in the future, it´s much harder to do this for 12 month and it´s outright impossible to do this for a point in time in a 5 years interval (okay, when you make your predictions in a generic way, it´s easy).

When we look into the history of computing, we see many technologies with a vast amount of market share having problems later on. Mainframes are such a example. Yeah ... Sun is such an example ... nobody expected in 1998 that Solaris would have the role of something else than the market leader in web services 10 years later. Many thought of Longhorn as the next big thing killing all other OSes. We´ve got Vista. In ten years we will think about Vista in the same way as Windows 98SE. Otherway round we see many systems which were almost dead with a bright future today. Think about MacOS 9 and MacOS X. Apple was pretty much a few years ago and today the market share on notebooks looks as near to 50%, at least when you walk through the train between Hamburg and Berlin. Other way round: 5 or 6 years ago the Palm Pilot was the unconquered leader of it´s market ... today ... the complete market was sucked up by cellular phone vendors and the vendor of a mp3-player on steroids. Apache vs. lighttpd or nginx. Sendmail vs. Postfix. Ingres vs. Oracle. CP/M vs. DOS. dBase vs. Access et al.

This example should show us one thing: There is no thing in IT that keeps it´s lead forever. Comebacks are possible. Complete removal from the market place is possible. It´s foolish to assume that any piece technology is excempted from this rule.

So Linux will encounter the same lifecycle. Think this is impossible? What would happen, if Linus Torvalds decides to take his midlife crisis and starts to do research on real penguins in a polar station. What would happen, if one of the large proponents (Red Hat, SuSE, Canonical) would collapse under the weight of this or the next recession? That´s not a linux-only thing ... just think about the "Steven Jobs is ill/dead/the new iGod" rumours.

In my opinion Linux is already on the downward path. There wasn´t an innovation in Linux that gave me the thought "Wow, that´s cool" for a long, long time (And to be honest: For many features i thought as cool features in Linux in my early UNIX years i´ve learned later on that they were implemented somewhere else (IRIX, Solaris, some old BSD et al) before) ... but your perspective may vary as your milage. This is nature of opinions. Dbase was moved out of market by other competitors making a faster transition to Windows. lighttpd is used by admins, who think that Apache httpd has grown to far to result into a stable and efficient webserver.

Furthermore: The user communities in the open source world are more fluid. The Microsoft ecosphere is a little bit different. Microsoft is only able to survive it´s constant underdelivery in regard of their operating system because of their applications. You have to use Windows, if you want to use MS Word or MS Excel. But as i wrote a while ago: In Open Source the binary of an application is just a Makefile away. Thus there is no application-enforced vendor lock-in. When people don´t like their old OS (out of whatever reason) anymore or just want features of another OS, it´s just an rsync to the new away. Commercial IT would take a little bit longer because of already existing runbooks and processes. But Unixes aren´t that far away from each other to make this impossible.

Despite what many want to think: Linux isn´t immune to this. So the interesting question is ... what will be after Linux? LinuxNG, OpenSolaris, BSD, Windunix? That´s an interesting question and i have no answer to it. Just an opinion. It the next Linux a already known operating system. Or a completly new operating environment?

What would be the path of Linux after such an downward path ... it´s a community development. The next interesting question is: Are highly dispersed development communities capable to restart a franchise? Like other restarts: MacOS 9 to X (non-opensouce), like Solaris 9 to 10 (open-sourcE). Both restarts were triggered from large companies with a large interest in the restart and deep pockets to pay developers. Or would the community just move to another prefered development platform moving Linux into a niche, like the BSDs today?

After writing this article i had an additional answer to the question of a customer: "Why does Sun still develop Solaris instead of supporting Linux the development" aside from all the technological and commercial reasons: Because Linux needs Solaris. Without a strong, innovative competitor the downward spiral (as the innovation would be just limited to supporting new hardware) would just go faster and this would open an opportunity to other systems. The otherway round Solaris needs Linux ... Solaris 10 would look different without the large impact of Linux in the market and the balance of power between Windows and. Unix would look differently. It´s the same with MacOS. The Apple developers were in need of an improving Windows to restart the MacOS franchise with X. Without it Apple would be a large part of computer history, but not of contemporary IT.

So, we should think about the time after Linux as well we should think how Linux gain strength in such a phase. But as i wrote at start, it´s hard to think about it, when predictions are such a hard business.

Es ist eine interessante zeitliche Koinzidenz, denn ich wusste nichts von dem Vorhaben, in Muenchen eine OSUG auf die Beine zu stellen, und ich glaube auch nicht, das die Münchener Kollegen davon wussten, das ich ähnliches für Hamburg angedachte habe, da ich vornehmlich im Hamburger Umfeld darueber diskutiert habe. Die Zeit scheint irgendwie reif fuer das dedizierte Netzwerken in der Solaris-Userschaft zu sein.

Sei es drum: Am 12.1. findet in der Sun Geschäftsstelle in München das erste Treffen der Munich OpenSolaris User Group statt. Für weitere Informationen konsultiert bitte die Webseite der MUCOSUG. Die Ankündigung des ersten Events findet ihr ebenfalls dort.

Ars Technica writes in "A look back at the open source victories of 2008":

Sun released the very first version of OpenSolaris this year. OpenSolaris, which emerged from Project Indiana, was created to build a user-friendly desktop distribution on top of the open source Solaris platform. Despite some early friction, the project shows a lot of promise. The second release, which occurred earlier this month, included some impressive functionality, such as a new ZFS snapshot visualization feature.

Nice to see OpenSolaris in such an article

The winner in the category "Most fix aircraft orders" is: Airbus. They were able to gather 756 orders whereas Boeing just got 662. But these numbers show another interesting trend: The boom seems to be over. This years order combined are just a little bit higher as the numbers of each of them last year (Boeing was the winner last year with 1.412 orders. Airbus had 1.342)

Paul Murphy writes in his article "Predictions for 2009":

Sun is an odd case: by any reasonable standard the company should be a big winner next year: in particular with respect to storage markets, web services markets, and HPC markets. In practice the company is often its own worst enemy: unable to cope with people manipulating its stock, unwilling to tell the mid market about its products, and collectively baffled by the tsunami of ignorance characteristic of the IT press writing for the Wintel industry.

I hope the this year will be a better year than the last one for Sun. But i´m confident about that.

Das neue Jahr hat begonnen, Zeit also die HHOSUG zu startenn. Obwohl die Usergruppe Hamburg im Namen traegt, ist das doch eher auf die Metropolregion Hamburg bezogen. Um erstmal einen gemeinsamen Kommunkationskanal aufzubauen, habe ich bei XING um die Einrichtung einer XING Gruppe gebeten. Gestern ist diese dan auch eingerichtet worden. Wer Interesse an einer Mitarbeit hat (ob aktiv oder passiv), würde ich bitten, sich in dieser Gruppe anzumelden!

When you really thing about harddisks, you could get the feeling, that this subsystem is a really delicate one. You read data from disk spinning at up to 15.000 rpm, trying to catch tracks as narrow as 50 nm, and you don´t read the data from the hard disk, you read a waveform and compute the most probable data pattern out of it. All together it´s a little bit of an suffciently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic.But at the end the system "harddisk" is really susceptible for perturbations from outside.

Brendan Gregg was able to measure the latency impact of sonic waves hitting the casing of hard disks - with a low-tech approach as he wrote in Unusual disk latency.



I don´t want to know how he found out about this effect ... perhaps a debugging session or a harddisk falling on his feet. Nevertheless it´s an impressive usecase for the Analytics feature of our new 7000 series storage. Try to find such effects with the tools from our beloved competitors. Their products are susceptible for "Brendans war scream" as well (as they use hard disks, too) ... but you can´t measure it.

It´s 2009. At least in my timezone. Happy new year. There is a lot of uncertainity around because of the economic problems, the unsolved problems of this world. And many start this year with fears: But i found a good quote in this book, that fits into this sitation:

Your mission is the luminous path that you follow, no matter how dark the night around you.

You can´t change the world, but you can make the world at both sides of your path a less darker place.

As the first of my readers enter 2009 in a few minutes (e.g. the readers in New Zealand), i want send some greetings from my side:

I wrote it before in my blog, but once (when i was young and wild) i threw a sales rep out of my office, who tried to get into the account (me) by FUDing their competitor. I was responsible for an project in the range of 10 Million Euro, thus i assume they got to much "Deutsche Mark" signs in their eyes. I had a basic simple rule for conversations with vendors: You have to shine for your self. If you need to point to non-product related weak points, there is a high probability, that the business relation will be an unpleasant ride.

I wouldn´t disect HP or IBM balance sheets at a customer meeting, albeit i would disect peformance claims and hint to quirks.I wont use the unclear future of FuSi directly at a customer. I fight on a technical level ... everything else is for sissys not knowing their shit ...

Using FUD is a good fear detector in my daily business. The amount of spreaded FUD is proportional to the amount of fear. Thus i have to assume that Mr. Zemlin of the Linux Foundation is really afraid of Solaris.

In the article "Linux in 2009: Recession vs. GNU" wants to make a point for Linux again. It´s Zemlin FUD time again. I tend to award him the "Golden FUD catapult 2008" for this stuff and his infamous involvement in this story

At first: When all the commercial products are to expensive for a customer, he could opt in recession times for the free stack at Sun. For example running your systems with Opensolaris, Sun Java Application Server, Mysql or the Sun Web Stack for free without support. And when your company have weathered the recession and your budget isn´t such a sad story, just call the Sales Rep. Or you could use the equivalent to a debian like structure. OpenSolaris 2008.11 with Glassfish V3 with Mysql Community Edition. Recession IT budgets doesn´t equals Linux. But i wrote about that before. I wont write about it again here ...

I was upset by another comment. He states :

Zemlin also sees FOSS as remaining strong on the server, with Linux continuing to be the major player. Most of Linux's growth in 2009, he said, will be "at the expense of Sun Microsystems, which is floundering in its business model right now. People look at Linux, and they say, HP, IBM, Dell, Intel and AMD -- these are collectively not going to go out of business any time soon. Then they look at Sun Microsystems, and they say, 'Whoa! This company has some serious financial difficulties, they have an uncertain future -- that's not a safe bet for me.' Nobody is really growing much, but where there is growth, it's going to in Linux."

I want to dissect this statement.

At first. AMD and Intel are somewhat OS agnostic. They make their money with supporting Windows, not with this niche market called Unix x86 market. Sorry ... the Q1CY2008 x86 server market was 1.9 million systems large. The market for MacOS X based systems was 2.6 systems(perhaps this is the reason, why they got the "65nm chip in a 45nm casing" custom build from Intel for the MacBook Air). Server x86 is a an intersting business for both it it doesn´t pay their bills. Or the other way round: If you don´t like Sun x86, you just can user IBM, HP or Dell as well with Opensolaris x86. And furthermore: IBM, HP or Dell aren´t married to Linux. When the three think that there is money to make with Solaris, they will sell it. And they already sell it. And they will drop Linux faster than you can write "penguin" when they come to the conclusion, that it´s not cost effective to sell and support Linux.

BTW, Mr. Zemlin, Sun has no financial difficulties ... it has a problem with its stock price ... the financial reality and the stock price isn´t really correlated (if it´s correlated at all, i have my doubts about it))

Okay: Opensolaris ... the code is opensourced, the cat is out of the bag. Anybody can build it´s own business on the basics. Just a thought game: Let´s assume Sun would go out of business tomorrow. Without a warning. Jonathan says: "Dear shareholders, here is the money. Let´s call it a day. And thank you for the fish". Now take into consideration, that the installed base of Solaris as large as billions and billions. Business is like political power. It don´t like a vacuum. Allowing everybody to participate in the development is just one side of opening the source. The other side is the fact that you enable everybody to support the code. The whole business model of Red Hat or Suse is largely based on this point. Thus in the theoretical case Sun support for Solaris would disappear, it would take a few days until another company fills this vacuum. There is money to earn. Much money. But this whole discussion is hypothetical: There is no vacuum to fill, as Sun won´t disappear. And Sun wants to earn this money. Anyway: The complete discussion and the idea introduced by Mr. Zemlin is just utter nonsense, classic spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. FUD 101.

I could make a similar prediction about Linux: In the course of the recession more users of will opt for free distributions like Debian, CentOS and OpenSuSE as their budgets don´t allow them to buy support for every system. The sales of subscriptions will decrease. This will lead to financial pressure to the major vendors of Linux distributions. Because of the single-trick ponyness of both vendors (RedHat and Novell) it put both companies on the verge to oblivion. They will cease to exists of purchased by IBM or HP. Futhermore this will bring problems for the core development of Linux (not the drivers, the real core) as the both companies employ many of the core devlopers.

Doesn´t sound reasonable? Well ... then tell why it´s more rational to assume a company with hundreds of billions installed base, billions of revenue a year, positive cash flow, 2 billions at the bank, almost no debts should go out of business or purchased. The last thing is extra ridiclious. It´s credit crunch time at the moment. The hedge fund locusts don´t get money to do they business at all even for smaller deals, everybody keeps it´s money to have liquid money in case of a longer credit crunch phase and we didn´t talked about the anti-trust regulations at all.

At the end Mr. Zemlin just spreads FUD. Large amounts of it. Dear Mr. Zemlin, we can talk about the importance of features like in your last FUD marketing attempt, we could talk about technical advantages of Linux and Solaris. But dear Mr. Zemlin, stop to discredit yourself as a FUD thrower ... otherwise you are burden for the community you represent ... again ...

2008 is over. Almost. I don´t think, that the last few days will change it. At least i hope so. But ... i don´t see any game-changing development for the last few hours of this years.

One of the big headlines of this year was "loss": The biggest loss at first. I´ve lost my grandma at the beginning of this year. My grandma was already in an age of 60 when i was born. That´s an age where the death starts to take away our grand parents. So the additional 34 years were a gift. Each year.

In the middle of the year i´ve lost a friendship ... at least i thought she was a good friend. But errors are human and i´m just a human. I really thought that that this loss would hurt me. I don´t make friendship easily. But at the end the exact circumstances of this situation created opposite feelings. At the end it´s better that way: Friendship is something mutual ... and if one person think of a relation as a friendship and one other as a loose acquaitance it´s better to keep it the second way. I still do not fully understand the dynamics of that situation but i stopped thinking about it a while ago. You can´t look into the brain of other people.

At the end of the year I´ve lost another friendship to a large heap of misunderstandings. But without trust there is no friendship ... and at the end there was no trust. It´s just a very loose acquaintence now from my point of view. It was my fault as well as the the fault of this friend. But well ... this happens. Shit happens.

The other big headline was "win": I´ve won new friends. Albeit i never met Marianne, we have developed a strange kind of friendship in the mean time. I´ve met other great persons this year. I would call them friends right at this moment, but they are already important to me.

Additionally i thought, i´ve lost the very special relation to another person, but the end of this year proved otherwise. There are very rare persons in your life who are so special, that even not seeing them for a while and huge hassles in both lifes doesn´t change a thing.

Personal targets? The last two years weren´t good ones in regard of my weight. Too much work, too much frustrations, less sports. This has to change, but i started to do more sports. So this will be just a matter of months after. Christmas is over, so no further problematic days in sight. Want back to my old weight.

The blog got more and more important to me this year. Personally and professionally. My objectives for this year were 5000 Visits per day , 750 subscribers und 600.000 Pageviews. The results of this year: Up to 10000 visits per day (with large variances the, at the weekend the visit count drops to 1000, monday and friday are the best days), 1175 subscribers (right before cristmas) and 750.000 page views and 15 million served requests by the webserver. Objectives for the next year? Well ... up to 20000 vists, 2000 subscribers and 1.5 million page views. I know ... very high targets but targets have to be hard to be challenging.

The "Less known Solaris features" series was a large success. 15.000 downloads of the pdf versions. The web log versions of the document´s articles were loaded 105.859 times in the last year. My plans for the next year? I´m already working on a german version. I will publish it as a book as planed at first. I will publish it as a free .pdf-book again. In the next few weeks i will publish a revised version (with the help of Ceri Davis, who helped with the english grammar and typo checking) of the english version. I hope i can iron out all the tex warnings in the next few weeks. Such a tedious job...

Professionally i will plan my next steps in the next few weeks: I´m member of the ´09 SEED mentoring programme as mentee and i was one of the first ones matched to a mentor. I think i had luck with my mentor.

I plan to talk more often on public conferences (hope my papers are accepted, one is a live LKSF session, another a talk about my view to virtualisation and some additional smaller sessions) and i´m planing for a new career step (I´m staying at Sun, at least when Sun doesn´t think, i should be part of the 6000 people, so it´s something internal to Sun) but it´s much to early to talk about that.

I wish you all a good start in the next year. May all your hopes for 2009 come true. May all your fears in 2009 turn out as unnescessary over the course of the year.