Recent Posts by Chris Beal

I'm blogging about this now because I realise I didn't when Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU27 came out. So it's a little bit late, but hopefully useful. Oracle Solaris 11.1 introduced the compliance(8) tool and framework. This is designed as a security audit capability, to keep your security auditor happy it generates reports against certain benchmarks. The two main security ones are the solaris recommended security benchmark, and the pci-dss one. When 11.4 was coming out we introduced...

One thing we've been trying to do in Oracle Solaris over the last few years is make it easier for our customer to engage with support should a problem occur. And make that engagement easier for all involved. Getting the right information about the system that the problem occurred on to support earlier really helps our support team to give you the right assistance. There's no point in sending you information on how to solve an IPS problem if the problem occurs on Solaris 10...

I love opensource software, I use it every day, but sometimes a component I need is either not present in or at the wrong version in Oracle Solaris. We often hear the same requests from our customers too. Please can I have version x.y of opensource software FOO on Oracle Solaris 11.4. Oracle Solaris depends heavily on opensource software and we try to keep them reasonably up to date, while being careful not to break anything. However we don't have every peice of opensource...

With the release of the October 2018 Solaris 10 Extended Support Recommended patch set, you can now run Solaris 10 in Oracle Cloud. I thought it would be good to document the main steps for getting an image you can run in OCI High level steps are Create a Solaris 10 image using Virtualbox and get it patched with the October 2018 patch set Unconfigure it and shut it down Upload it to the Oracle Cloud object storage Create a custom image from that object you've just uploaded Create a...

Those of you that have ever read my own blog (Ghost Busting) will know I've a long standing interest in trying to get the systems we all use and love to be easier to fix, and ideally tell you themselves what's wrong with them. Back in Oracle Solaris 11 we added the concept of Software Fault Management Architecture (SWFMA), with two types of event modelled as FMA defects. One was panic events, the other SMF service state transitions. This also allowed for notification of all...

Oracle Solaris 11.4 Beta is now available. One of the most requested features may seem like a tiny thing, but could have a huge impact on your VM deployments, or if you happen to deal with very large files regularly (eg video files). Copying files is usually a case of telling the file system to read the blocks from disk, then telling them to write those same blocks to a different bit of the disk. reflink(3) allows you to tell the file system to simply create a new mapping to...

One of the very coolest things about Oracle SPARC is Oracle's ability to engineer the processor to do what the software really needs. This moves intensive processing from general purpose compute cores, to special purpose pipelines. As these are designed to do just a small number of things, they are simple, fast, and we can have a lot of them. Trouble is, how do you know they're really doing something.One of the most impressive of these is Database Analytics Acceleration...