solaris

Fixing X11 Forwarding Over SSH and with Sudo

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X11 forwarding over SSH not working? Not setting $DISPLAY correctly in your shell? Having problems with X11 and sudo? Yeah, me too. Total pain in the duff. Here’s what I do to fix it. I’m thinking about Linux when I write stuff like this but a lot of this has worked on AIX and Solaris, too. Make sure your SSH client supports X11 Forwarding and that it’s turned on. I use SecureCRT but I know it works in PuTTY as well. Once you turn it on in your client & save the settings you will need to reconnect, the forwarding is established with the connection. Ensure xauth and xterm are installed. You need xauth for this to work, and xterm …

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Uptime Is Not Something To Be Revered

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Slashdot has a link to a tribute video to a Sun that was up continuously for 3737 days. That’s 10.23 years. It’s like a sequoia tree seeing the passage of civilization around it: My thoughts on this: The data center and infrastructure powering this machine was built in such a way as to keep this thing powered continuously for 10 years. Whoever built and ran that infrastructure was doing a good job. It’s a generalization but I bet there are very few cloud providers that can boast anything like that. That version of Sun Solaris is reliable enough to keep operating for years without disruption. Most OSes are, by the way, even Microsoft Windows. That particular hardware is reliable enough …

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GNU Screen For Fun and Profit

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My friends and fellow virtualization professionals Tim Oudin & Joep Piscaer & Paul Gear and some commenters reminded me that the perfect complement to SSH session instability is the GNU utility ‘screen’. Indeed, I’ve been using it for years, and I recommend it to everybody doing any significant work in an SSH session. As the FSF puts it, “screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.” In short, it virtualizes your interactive shell session so you can disconnect from it and reconnect to it as needed. On Linux hosts it usually comes as a package, else you can download it from gnu.org and compile it. I’ve built it on DEC UNIX and AIX in …

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Who Cares About Time Zones Anyway?

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If you think you have a thankless job you should think about Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. Heck, it’s not even a paying job for them. They’re volunteers. Perhaps even masochists. What do they do? They maintain the time zone database (“zoneinfo”) for all of the computing world. And while residents of a particular country have to put up with just the general stupidity of their own politicians, these guys have to put up with all the stupidity of all politicians, across the Earth. Every time a politician in Russia, or Cameroon, or Indiana thinks it’d be a good idea to screw with the clocks these guys update and redistribute their database[0]. Vendors pick up the update and send …

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Why I Don't Use Third-Party Binary Packages

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There are a number of third-party package repositories out there for Linux distributions. For example, Fedora runs the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository, which contains builds of open source software that isn’t supplied with Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Similarly, a lot of projects have their own repositories that supply builds of software for OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Maybe it’s just because I’m old-school, and maybe it’s because I enjoy compiling things, but I really don’t like the idea of using binaries found on the Internet. I never have. As an aside, I really tried hard to make the rest of this post not be critical, or seem like criticism, but instead just be a reflection of …

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