Archive | May, 2008

The 25 Year Old UNIX Bug

By on May 11, 2008 in Uncategorized

1983: The year of the IBM PC XT, the Apple Lisa, Pioneer 10 leaving the solar system, and Hooters opening up shop in Florida. It’s also the birthyear of a 25 year old UNIX bug, squashed only a few days ago.

(I wonder why the bug wasn’t submitted to relevant maintainers when it was found)

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Github

By on May 6, 2008 in Portfolio

I believe in contributing back to the Open Source community. I do this using Github. The ability to fork a repo then give the author of the original code a Pull Request makes for a wonderful model of social coding. By clicking the image above, you’ll be taken to my profile where you can see my activity on the site.

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ACPI on Open Solaris

By on May 5, 2008 in Operating Systems

They’ve known about this one for over a year – yet they still haven’t fixed it. It appears that if you have an Abit AB-9 QuadGT motherboard the thermal zone monitor (tzmon) will constantly spaff errors at you. To fix this as a once off you can do:

modinfo | fgrep tzmon
# Grab the number from the first column, mine was 124
modunload -i 124

Problem solved. If you want it fixed between reboots, you’ll need to edit the tzmon.conf and then perform an init 6 (don’t just reboot!).

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Open Solaris 2008.5 is out

By on May 5, 2008 in Operating Systems

It seems Open Solaris 2008.5 has made an appearance on the Internet. I just installed it onto a new HDD to discover a few odd things.

The main one is lack of things in the SMF database. I had to import the Apache 2.2 manifest into SMF myself. That seems a little odd.

lpackham@opensolaris:~# svccfg
svc:> import /var/svc/manifest/network/http-apache22.xml
svc:> exit
lpackham@opensolaris:~# svcs -a | fgrep apa
disabled       10:56:04 svc:/network/http:apache22
lpackham@opensolaris:~#

Somewhat irritating – but at least it now works.

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