The Lone Sysadmin

I think I understand why Solaris system administrators are angry at the world. Their operating system sucks. I have been watching a colleague of mine who is an excellent Linux and Windows administrator learn the workings of Solaris, and he’s been describing some of it to me. I helped him set up Solaris x86 version 10 on a SunFire v20z yesterday, and my god did that suck. The installation took an hour, mostly because the machine sat there trying to detect things that it was ultimately going to ask us about later anyhow, and then it took forever to copy the data from the DVD to the hard disk.

How does an OS still not have logical volume management built in? What do you mean I get eight partitions? AIX has had LVM support for what, 15 years now? Windows, Linux, and HP-UX all have it, too. If you ask me (and I realize you aren’t) the single most annoying and dangerous operation on a machine is growing a filesystem. Oh, it’s so nice when you can just do it while the server is online, without having to shuffle partitions around and copy data. Maybe someday Solaris admins will discover this, too (those that don’t shell out the big bucks for Veritas’ Disk Suite).

Beyond LVM, you get eight partitions, and the system takes two or three of them? So what, I can have five distinct filesystems on my 146 GB disk? Oh, that’s nice and flexible. Why don’t we just make one big root filesystem and be done with it?

Why do the network interfaces all have different names depending on the hardware? Is it not the job of the operating system to abstract that? Why do some machines have hme0 and some have bge0 when it’s all just the primary NIC? Sure, I can see not naming your ATM and Ethernet interfaces with the same convention, but these are all Ethernet NICs? Can’t you just pick a name, like eth0 or something, so that all the admins stuck with this crap can get rid of all the if statements in their scripts?

Solaris admins, I’m sorry that you have to deal with stuff like this. Don’t be angry at the world, or at your brethren with other OSes, just find another OS that doesn’t look like it’s been hacked together by 89 different groups of people, all with different ideas of how things should work and no commonality whatsoever. Your time and sanity are valuable, despite how Sun treats you.

So this morning I discovered I have a cold. I hate colds. I don’t know what is up, but this is the third cold in as many months. I hate taking cold medicine, mostly because it makes me feel even worse than the cold itself. Taking a drug to ease an infection just seems like it’s making my body work twice as hard, once for the cold and once to get rid of the drugs. So for now I remain mucus boy, double-fisting huge glasses of water. Ugh. I just hope I didn’t give it to anybody I was with this weekend. The bad feelings of a cold are far outweighed by the knowledge that someone else is ill because of me.

To distract myself from my health woes I bought an Apple iPod nano this afternoon. Ostensibly it’s a device that will assist me with my work. I can boot PCs and servers from it, though I only tried it using the HP USB Disk Format utility. I haven’t tried Linux on it, but I do know that its iPod-ness gets very messed up when you format it. If you do this learn to like the hard reset (hold down select & up simultaneously). It also seems as if the base firmware on the iPod knows that the rest of its OS is at a specific memory location, because copying the iPod folder back to it after using the HP utility doesn’t work very well, either.

I don’t know how SanDisk or any of those other companies can compete against the iPod nano. The iPod is $10 to $20 more than the other flash disk offerings, and you can listen to music on it. The 2 GB SanDisk MicroCruzer is tiny, too, and prone to me losing it. My old 1 GB SanDisk Cruzer, which was a trooper and had been through the washer & dryer three times successfully before the fourth fateful trip, was small enough that I lost that all the time. It’s 2 GB successor is half its size again, and would be an instant waste of $200. At least the iPod has some decent size to it. I can deal with thin devices, it’s just microscopic ones that drive me nuts.

Maybe I’ll try some nighttime cold medication anyhow…

I first heard this one uttered by Jon Krakauer on Nova’s Mountain of Ice

“Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” - Vilhjalmur Stefanson